Short Fiction
Dyke á l'Orange: a monstrously incorrect tale
a short story by David Ortmann
inspired by actual events and fantasy
first written, December 2001, esentially complete
Experts say that a school of piranha can skeletonize a cow in minutes. These same experts should see what a lesbian can do to duck á l'orange in the same amount of time.
I am a lesbian. Not because I am particularly good at it or have a degree in it, I simply am. The word dyke has never bothered me. In a country devoid of royalty, I wear it like a title. Duke. Duchess. Dyke. Being a lesbian, it's fairly easy to find other lesbians in a crowd. I am not talking about picking out the gals at the local Indigo Girls concert. Difficult this is not. I am talking about everyday, walking down the street dyke gaydar, a dyktector, if you will. I've seen them all. Softball sisters, beer bust babes, leather ladies, dykes on bikes, Heather's two suburban mommies; I've seen Senate dyke, nundyke, tits and ass dyke, even Sharon Stone-Basic-Instinct-beautiful-brilliant-but-crazy-as-fucking-hell-dyke. I thought nothing could surprise me.
But that was before I met Dyke á l'Orange.
I met her on Saint Patrick's Day, a holiday that has traditionally made me run for the hills. Literally. Even in my younger days, when I aspired to pack-a-day-belly-up-to-the-bar-dykehood, I would often hit the road and head for the woods to escape that crazy and drunken holiday. This Saint Patrick's Day found me at a secluded Northern California hot springs, named Webster. It's lesbo-paradise. There's more fish in those waters than in the Atlantic and Pacific combined, and not a penis in sight. Not that I have anything against dick, personally. Aesthetically, they just seem very, well. in the way.
Even the drive North was paradise. My car's name is Grace. A sensible earth-hued Honda coupe, she chugged up the winding hills of California's Highway One. I had forsaken the faster inland highways for this scenic route. Grace's rear bumper proudly bears the sticker Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live. That's my motto. If you move it, put it back. If you spill it, wipe it the fuck up. Use only what you need and leave the rest. Walk softly and leave nothing but footprints.
The 1980s pop hit "99 Luftballoons" was playing on Grace's tape deck. I'd set it to repeat. It played the whole three-hour drive. I sang along, never tiring of it. I had no idea what the words meant, but the music video hints at an anti-war message and how mass gluttony would be humankind's downfall. That's all I need to know. Live simply. Don't wear clothing made in sweatshops. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Yeah.
My first morning at Webster, I soaked in my favorite outdoor hot tub. It's only three feet deep and perfectly warm. Kicking off my sandals and dropping my sarong, I settled my travel-weary body into the water and let the effects of the long drive wash away. The tub could easily hold eight people but I was completely alone. I stretched my long legs out, tied my mane of auburn curls into a simple knot at the top of my head and lay back, drinking in the healing waters and the silence.
Like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, I heard her before I saw her. Her guttural belch resounded through the valley like some terrible song. If the hills were alive, they must have been frightened. As she heaved her bulk sideways through the latch gate, I found myself wishing instead for the dirndl-clad Fraulein Maria and her flock of goat puppets. If she heard my stuttered "hello," she chose to ignore it.
Simply put, this was the largest human being I had ever seen in my life. She was Rubenesque; and I mean the sandwich, not the painter. She was easily the size of those refrigerator/freezer combos that were popular during the 1970s. Fearful of water displacement, I clung to the rim of the tub like Kate Winslet did in Titanic, knowing I was completely sinkable next to this ship. She dropped a caftan that could have easily housed six drag queens doing Liz Taylor-and I mean fat, 1970's Liz, not National fucking Velvet. I swear that muumuu thudded when it hit the concrete. That was when I noticed her naked body.
She had a bush so thick that it rivaled the forest that devoured those annoying young actors in The Blair Witch Project. It began at her tits and ended somewhere around her knees and was long. Even Pocahontas couldn't have braided the thing. Her epic tits sported areolas the size of regulation Frisbees. As she sank, the waves knocked me under water as though I were a dead fish in a flushed toilet. Churning water, I cracked my knee against the cement. Water rushed up my nose. As I struggled to resurface, I must have banged my head and passed out.
When I awoke, she was gone. I was alone in the tub, wrinkled as a charpe, and hungry. An hour had past. I don't own a watch because they are the fascist shackles of an industrial paradigm, but I can tell time by the position of the sun. It was exactly 11:33a.m.
My entire worldview had been challenged. What kind of human would leave another in such distress? I could have drowned! I rose and inspected myself, examining some bruises and minor cuts. There was no permanent damage from the hour I'd lost from my life. Some people who lose time tell tales of being abducted by little gray aliens. That almost sounds glamorous next to near drowning at the hands of McDonald's answer to lesbian Grimace. Aside from the hunger gnawing at my belly, I yearned for open space to walk, free of the confinement of the tub.
I took the long route back to the lodge where the communal kitchen awaited me like a sanctuary. I would make some steamed veggies over brown rice, or rice-of-color. I would sit by the fire and read passages aloud from Our Bodies Ourselves. Perhaps I would drift off to sleep to the sound of a toddler frolicking in the library. I love children. Even more, I love the lesbians who flock here-dykes who've been lovers for years with their little bundles of joy cooing from beneath fleece one-pieces.
I skipped back to the lodge in my all-man-made-product sandals, deciding that my morning trauma had been a dream, nothing more. No human would do that to another, and certainly no lesbian would do that to another. Later I would read that people often blocked traumatic events from their consciousness by attributing them to some sort of dream-sleep phenomenon. But that was before. Before I knew.
I opened the back door to the kitchen and my stomach began to turn cartwheels. The kitchen was completely empty except for her, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival's answer to Shelly Winters. With every available pot, pan, and utensil surrounding her like a battalion of war-weary soldiers, she raised her left hand and kept her head focused on the cutting board before her. Spiked on her fleshy arm was a skinned and decapitated carcass that, in some recent incarnation, must have been a bird.
The sink was overflowing with greasy dishes and pots. There was scarcely enough room to fill a glass of water. Every available surface was covered with colanders, cutting boards, and crock-pots. A huge glass barrel of orange sauce oozed its pulpy guts onto the counter space. She must have plucked the poor animal, as the floor was littered with downy feathers that swirled across the planking each time she made the slightest move.
"I'm making duck á l'orange." She said simply as a means, I assumed, of justifying her total domination of the kitchen while fisting a dead bird. She gestured with the hand on which she'd impaled the poor creature and said, "I'm gonna be a few minutes," essentially ending the one-sided conversation and turning her attention toward an economy size tub of lard.
I don't remember opening the can of beans or returning to my cottage. Like the loss of time that morning, at one moment I was gone and at another I was back. Sitting with my knees curled against my stomach, I was nestled into a corner of my bed eating cold pintos from a can. Stabbing at the beans with a fork I was unable to shake the image of that horrible monster with the mutilated bird on her paw. I thought of Tweety-bird and that nasty fucking cat. What was that creature's name? Sylvester. I thought of Tweety and Sylvester and was overcome with a singular thought, subversively quiet at first and then overwhelmingly insistent: Dyke á l'Orange must be stopped.
My own farting awoke me. My ass felt as though it would split clear open from those damn beans. The cracked toilet seat was ice cold. My nipples wrinkled and hardened. Gushing forth, I laid a cable that could put HBO out of business.
I feared for that poor toilet, but she flushed like a champ. Easily ten pounds lighter, I wiped my ass and looked toward the sun. It was 5:34p.m. I thought of dinner and my stomach moaned. That creature had to be out of the kitchen by now. How long could duck á l'orange take to prepare? It was served cold for Christ's sake!
But she was there. She was there the way Mount Rushmore is there. Non-negotiably. The omnivorous beast had managed to throw the kitchen into even more disarray than it had been that afternoon. Orange sauce was everywhere. It crept down the walls like that gunk in The Amityville Horror, cementing feathers to every available surface. It looked as though someone had exploded a Cherokee tribe in there. A mountain of filthy pots and pans lay neglected and crusty in the sink. More pots and utensils lay on the floor.
"I'm making duck á l'orange." She said, without looking up from a pan she was greasing. She was slick with sweat and bird innards. "I'm gonna be a few minutes."
There are moments in one's life when one's purpose is clear. Standing in that war zone, I knew what needed to be done. My hunger for food disappeared as my mission quickly crystallized before me. I left the kitchen and sat in a corner of the dining room, dwarfed by the old upright piano. I waited.
Dinnertime crept by unnoticed. Finally at 9:30 p.m., a full ten hours since she'd tried to drown me in the hot tub, Dyke á l'Orange emerged sweaty and slug-like from her cave. On a platter were three ducks, each the size of an infant's fist. Never in the history of cooking, had so much time and mess resulted in so little food. Of course, I noticed, there was not a vegetable or whole-grain in sight.
In the dining room was a small yellow hi-chair on wheels where I'd watched a little blonde baby gleefully eat his organic mashed peas just an hour earlier. With a motion far too fluid for the weight of her leg, she kicked the hi-chair clear across the dining room. It cashed into the far wall. "Kids," she said to no one in particular. "They take up space even when they're not around."
She settled her ass into a chair that let out an audible plea for mercy and began to graze, chewing and slurping like a toothless, prehistoric cow. Tearing seared duck flesh from its bones, she chewed and wheezed, tossing aside clumps of grizzle and sinew onto the pristine table covering. She paused every so often to pick at bits of meat caught in her wrinkled gums.
I had seen enough. It was time.
I entered the devastated kitchen, grabbed what was left of the ten-pound glass barrel of orange sauce, and sneaked out the rear door. No one noticed me. I had the stealth of an Asian warrior. Ninja-dyke.
With scarcely a crescent moon in the sky, I knew I could operate under the cover of complete darkness. Mission Possible. There was not a soul in sight. Most of the guests were asleep or soaking in the tubs, a good two hundred yards away. They'd hear nothing, I was sure. I hid in the bushes outside the lair of Dyke á l'Orange. I was certain there were bedsprings somewhere inside that would breathe a sigh of relief when they realized their mistress wasn't coming home that night.
I paused with the patience reserved for all things truly worth waiting for in life. Again, I heard her before I saw her. Rita Coolidge would never understand the true feeling of the earth moving under her feet until she lay in wait for Dyke á l'Orange. The city of San Francisco had crumbled in lesser earthquakes. She got back to her cabin faster than I thought she would. That could only mean she hadn't bothered to clean up the kitchen. I felt my fingers tighten around the heavy glass jar.
If Dyke á l'Orange heard me approaching behind her, she never let on. As she fumbled for her keys, I raised the Mason jar of orange sauce high and brought it down with a resounding crack over her head. It didn't sound like I thought it would. I expected a splintering crack. Or a fleshy crunch, like some cranial avalanche. Instead I heard a dull thud that was grossly anticlimactic. I only had to hit her once. For a big girl, she fell pretty easily. One whack and she crumpled at my feet like a two-ton sack of potatoes. Not even a whimper.
She was dead. Of that I was sure. It was hideous. Not the act itself, I mean, but the colors it produced. The orange sauce mingled with the blood that gushed from the top of her head. Red and orange. It simply didn't match. I was grateful there were no gay men around to disapprove of the color scheme. Red and green would have been much more festive, I thought. I should have clocked her with a ten-gallon jar of mint sauce instead.
By the time I dragged her body far enough into the woods, it was nearly dawn. Nobody would ever find her out here, except the vultures and wildlife. What a treat they were in for, I thought with relish. Dyke á l'Orange: the ultimate buffet.
I didn't realize how much pain my back was in from hauling that huge bitch through the woods all night until I began the long walk back to Webster. I knew the hot tub would be waiting for me, bubbling merrily in the early morning light. I could hardly wait, I thought, and began to skip. In the meadow, birds awakened and began to sing. It was going to be a clear and beautiful morning. That hot tub had better be empty, I thought as I walked, remembering to do so softly and leave nothing but footprints.