To Sail Beyond the Sunset [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONEThe Committee for Aesthetic DeletionsI woke up in bed with a man and a cat. The man was a stranger; the cat was not.I closed my eyes and tried to pull myself togetherhook "now" to my memory of last night.No good. There wasn't any "last night." My last clear memory was of being a passenger in a Burroughs irrelevant bus, bound for New Liverpool, when there was a loud bang, my head hit the seat in front of me, then a lady handed me a baby and we started filing out the starboard emergency exit, me with a cat in one arm and a baby in the other, and 1 saw a man with his right arm offI gulped and opened my eyes. A stranger in my bed was better than a man bleeding to death from a stump where his right forearm ought to be. Had it been a nightmare? I fervently hoped so.If it was not, then what had I done with that baby? And whose baby was it? Maureen, this won't do. Mislaying a baby is inexcusable. "Pixel, have you seen a baby?" The cat stood mute and a plea of not guilty was directed by the court.My father once told me that I was the only one of his daughters capable of sitting down in church and finding that I had sat on a hot lemon meringue pie . . . anyone else would have looked. (I had looked. But my cousin Nelson Oh, never mind.)Regardless of lemon pies, bloody stumps, or missing babies, there was still this stranger in my bed, his bony back toward mehusbandly rather than loverly. (But I did not recall marrying him.)I've shared beds with men before, and with women, and wet babies.