Now, she was at the other side of the door with a tea service in hand, ready to enter the doctor’s examination room. The tea service rested more on her bosom. She had noticed Natasha’s mechanical metropolitan moustache and was intrigued.
“Yes, come in Nurse Buttkiss,” the doctor yelled, resigned to the interruption. He knew better, even if he was her employer, to disrupt the performance of the tea ritual. It was a code that he wanted to break to bend Buttkiss over to kiss her butt. He, too, needed a code-breaker.
The Nurse came smartly in as the doctor and Natasha hurriedly withdrew their fingers from the undead hamster’s case.
The tableau was a frozen moment of Swiss cheese going bad and becoming good, meeting the Giant Frog wolfing down the Allfather. All three, actually five, if you include the undead hamster and the still-alive frog, were participants in an event of untold and unimaginable cosmic importance. The barriers between life and death were about to be shattered.
“I brought sugar, milk and lemon,” said the Nurse.
“Evidently,” the doctor said, looking at the items on the tray resting securely against her bosom. “Here, let me take this tray from her.”
“That won’t be necessary, doctor,” as she quickly put the tray right on the small table next to the examination table where the undead hamster continued to remain oblivious to all these whore-age, axe-age, and sword-age-banging events occurring about him. It was a glorious time to be alive if you were undead.
The Nurse knew and was indifferent to the fact that her employer, as she called him, wanted to kiss her butt. She let him think she was mildly interested in the prospect because of the frog.
“Froggie,” she said, looking at the amphibian. It was an unconscious utterance of pained anguish cast against a pair of lunatics having at each other in the dead of winter.
Then, she quickly cast a side-long look at Natasha, who had been observing the interaction between the doctor and the nurse very carefully noted the tone of the Nurse’s naming of the terrarium’s sole pond inhabitant. Careful attention to the tone is invaluable.
Natasha Metropolis had learned this from the old hunter in the Siberian Steppes who had her frozen after Hitler had put the film into cold storage and threatened to put the characters in a concentration camp. The machine maid had managed to escape to Siberia, turned herself off and hibernated while waiting for the world’s political climate to thaw.
A retired top-secret KGB code-breaker agent specializing in spying on all words beginning with dys- the fleeing Soviet, had found her and treated them like the daughter he never had after he realized he could not have sex with her. He had taught her everything he knew.
Now, she was faced with how Swiss cheese existence is too good to be bad or too bad to be good; the opposite was also true.
