The Porcupine's Quill

Scene V:
Narcissistic Eb and Unlucky Flo

[Add setting]

MAN: We were down among the strippy currents basking in the afterglow of having torn ourselves apart when my true love said, “You should let some of your feminine side out.” I said, “If I let it out it will most certainly be slapped into prison.”

WOMAN: She said, “Give it a whirl.”

MAN: I let my feminine side out just for a minute and instantly it started dancing on its toes. It was going at this big-time.

WOMAN: “Put it back,” she said. “You let too much of it out.”

MAN: “Well, gosh!” I said. “Well, golly!”

WOMAN: I tried putting the whole thing back, but it ran one way and another and soon disappeared. It had gone to Florida. It had gone to the Sunshine Coast. Gone to where it could wear a bikini without being cold or arrested for conduct unbecoming to – ”

MAN: “I’m not hanging in with you any longer,” she said.

WOMAN: “You’ve gone all nasty masculine.”

MAN: “My feminine side has gone to a place where it can fulfill its destiny.”

WOMAN: “Get off me,” she said. “Get off me now.”

MAN: “I found it hard to love my mother,” I said. “She was a hard woman.”

WOMAN: “Sometimes I hate people, she said. I hate people who refuse to comb their hair. I’m very fond of feet, though. I have very nice feet. My mother used to tell me that. ‘You have very nice feet, Ruth,’ she’d say to me. Ruth was my sister. Mother was always confusing one of us with the other. She led a very confused life, my mother. I believe she never enjoyed a sturdy moment. She saw life through a prism of her own devising. The dog was the one party in our house able to tell Ruth and me apart. She was a most excitable dog. The house shook from that dog’s excitement and then you’d discover it was excited over nothing. Except that time the house burnt down. That time was different.”

MAN: “Are you done?” I said. “Are you quite finished?”

WOMAN: “Would you please get off me,” she said. “I can’t breathe down here. I’m dying. You ought to go to the gym and lose that flab.”

MAN: “What was all that stuff about dying with your boots on, I wonder?”

WOMAN: “What stuff?”

MAN: “I never got it. That ‘boots on’ business. What was the point? There was a lot of stuff like that in my childhood that I never got.”

WOMAN: “Me, too. Like how you got me.”

MAN: “That boot business bothers me. I’m a deeply troubled guy. Yet this is pretty good, us here like this. If there were a heaven, it would be exactly like this. Look, there’s my feminine side coming back. Wow, get a load of that outfit. Been shopping, I guess. A flaming dyke!”

WOMAN: “Arsehole.”

Read on: Act II, Scene VI »
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