Chapter 11

Shiny Friday

“Yo, Professor!”

I tore the masking tape from the upper corner of the Mercedes’s windshield, sighed, and looked up from my work.  “What’s up, Vinny?”

“It’s break time, man.  I got some shit here you definitely want to see.”

I snorted lightly and smiled ruefully.  “All right.  Let me just finish taping this off."

"No sweat, Professor.  Man, this is some serious shit…" he mumbled, half-sitting on the gleaming metal bumper of his four-wheel drive pickup, his eyes glued to his custom car magazine.  Vinny’s a good kid, as strong as an ox, and the first guy to call if you need a fender pounded out.  He isn't the brightest bulb on the tree, but then again he probably hadn't lost his wife, his car, and his job in the same afternoon.

Sighing again, I brushed a length of lank, greasy hair out of my face, sweat stinging my eyes a trifle, and returned to my work.  The day was quite warm, even for late October, and according to the bank clock across the street, we had just two degrees to go, to hit our promised high of eighty-five.  Some people might say I was being a masochist, working in the shop’s parking lot rather than in the cool shade of the garage, or in the paint bay proper, but natural light, of which Arizona has a surfeit, is best.

Joe’s Garage, named for both the owner and the owner’s reverence of Frank Zappa, is a pretty decent place to work, all things considered.  The pay is decent, the health plan is decent, the people are decent, and the work isn’t too hard.  Paint and body is all we do, or at least all I do since I’m the only painter.  There is Vinny, who began referring to me as ‘Professor’ upon hearing me use the word ‘nonetheless’.  He handles the physical stuff, gets replacement parts or paint we can’t get delivered, and acts as a second pair of hands should I need them.  There is also Minnie, a diminutive, vivacious older divorcee, who despite her smaller stature possesses of a pair of cans exactly the size and shape of my former wife’s, as well as a Cockney accent that melts the heart of everyone she meets.  She deals with customers, does the books, and takes care of the day-to-day business needs.  Joe, like any decent business owner, spends all his time on the golf course.

But I am the artist.  No one knows that I have a Master’s degree in chemistry, or that I was once married to a mannequin.  They just know me as that moody guy who doesn’t shave, smokes like a chimney, and mutters to himself a lot.

The 1966 Mercedes 250SE I was working on was in a sorry state, but I would restore her to her former perfection in good time.  There isn’t much rust in Arizona, but old Sol and desert sand can kill paint every bit as much.  Sighing I worked the tape down the driver's side section of the windshield.  I sighed a lot these days, and my few smiles were usually rueful.  Chalk it up to my life having been utterly destroyed.

They say time heals all wounds?  Minor ones maybe, abrasions and the like, but an ice pick to the soul never really heals.  It festers and suppurates, and if it doesn't end up ultimately killing you it can leave deep, sometimes visible, scars.  I thought about her as I smoothed down the tape.  Well, no, that isn’t quite true, I continued thinking about her, as I had pretty much done for every second of every day for the last three months.

I'd spent the first three days crying.  Not endlessly, of course, for I’d had things to do, namely drinking until I passed out, vomiting like a dog into the toilet (more or less), ramming my head into the side of the pool while swimming in a drunken stupor, cutting the shit out of my wrist while trying to open a can of sardines (it was an accident, I swear), and generally engaging in the kind of behavior that would give rock stars pause.

I’d kept my phone close by me at all times, hoping, wishing, dreaming, even praying that she would call, to tell me that she was wrong, that she loved me, begging me to forgive her for having broken my heart, and could I please come and pick her up?  It never rang.  I checked my battery compulsively to make sure it was charged.  I checked my voicemail religiously if I even suspected that there had been a signal drop.  Nothing.  With varying degrees of sobriety and lucidity I began to accept the fact that her decision to live as an object, as someone else’s object, was final.  She was not going to call.

Thanks to my good friends Jose Cuervo and Johnny Walker, I spent many hours drifting in and out of consciousness, mostly out.  I’d had the most awful dreams about her: sleeping on a bed in his garage, turning herself into a geisha for his pleasure, becoming a chrome robot and giving massages to that fat cocksucker and his breast-implanted whore of a wife.  All sorts of things I imagined and dreamed, all of them driving me to take yet another pull from the bottle so that I might induce unconsciousness, the only refuge I had.

I’d also kept an ear on the local news radio station, awaiting the announcement of that fat cocksucker’s impending run for governor, so that I could call in and publicly proclaim that aforementioned fat cocksucker was keeping a fucking slave.  It never came.  Don Carlos had apparently decided that fucking my shiny bride was far better than being on the campaign trail, kissing babies and shaking hands with old farts (of which Arizona also has a surfeit).

I was distracted from the never-ending marathon of heartbreak that played in my brain by the excited stammers of my assistant.  "H-holy shit, Professor!  Your car's in here.  Justine!  She's fuckin’ famous!"

I looked up from my work, that all-too familiar feeling of smothering coming over me again.  I straightened up, acutely aware of my every movement, the heat of the day, the sound of passing cars.  I put down the tape, and walked over to him, like a zombie, dread filling me up as though it were being pumped in through a nozzle.  I took the proffered magazine from him, my fingers dimly registering the weight of the slick, heavy paper.

It was her, all right, my Justine, beautifully polished, gleaming under professionally designed studio lighting.  She looked amazing; even her license plate shone.  As beautiful as she was, though, she looked positively drab in comparison with the glossy, canary yellow woman lying on her hood.

"Oh...my...God..."

"She's yours, ain’t she, Professor?  She looks just like that picture you got in your toolbox.”

“Not anymore,” I said, my voice dry and cracking, “someone else owns her now.”  The image on the page burned itself into my brain.  It was my ‘vette, as I had so often seen her in private, now splashed quite publicly across the pages of a magazine.

She lay on her back across Justine’s hood, her finish precisely matching that of my former car’s.  She gleamed, actually sparkling under the bright lighting.  Her eyes were closed, her lips pursed, a sensual, almost pre-orgasmic expression on her face, as though Justine’s engine was idling and she could feel the vibrations resonating through her.

I could feel my heart pounding wildly inside my chest, my erection straining the heavy fabric of my carpenter’s pants.  “Where…” I started, gulping dryly, “…where did you get this?”

“Over at that liquor store on the corner, when I was buying some smokes.  There was a line of people ahead of me.  Everybody was buying a copy.  Man, I never seen a line there like that before.”

A very small part of my brain paid attention to his words, but practically everything else was devoted to the shiny figure in the magazine.  She was just so mind-bogglingly amazing.  It was almost impossible to tear your eyes away from her: her legs were long and sleek; her belly flat and smooth; her back seductively arched as though responding to a lover’s touch; and her generous breasts, high and round, caught the light so perfectly that you knew she could not be real, for nothing in nature could ever be so perfect.

But there were some differences between the model in the magazine and the ’vette I used to have.  Firstly, she wasn’t nude, as was her preferred state of being, but you couldn’t exactly call her clothed either.  Don Carlos, or whoever, had fashioned a sort of string bikini for her, that looked exactly like the chrome trim of a classic car.  It wound over her hips and then steeply down into the valley of her pubis, widening only enough to conceal her sweet slit, then back up and around to her big boobs, molded to them, clinging to every contour of her wondrous bust, until the thin chrome lines terminated at her areola, where they expanded into large circles that resembled miniature car badges.

She also had hair now, but it wasn’t her hair, nor was it hair in the traditional sense, but rather incredibly thin fiber optic cable styled to simulate human hair.  It splayed about her, blending and merging with Justine’s finish.  Her eyebrows were painted on, a muted gray, but they no longer arched like they used to, rather they inclined slightly upwards, giving the illusion of speed.

The other major change that I could see was to her belly button – she didn’t have one.  Some people might think it had been airbrushed out, but I knew better.  It had simply been taped over and then sprayed over, thus eliminating any evidence that she was an organic creature, which would only serve to confuse the viewer more: was she real, or was she a computer-generated image?

I had to admit it was slickly done, because the way that light and shadow were used made it appear as though she were real, but your experiences also told you that she couldn’t be real, because no woman had ever looked that good.  It was a dichotomy that was temporarily shelved by your dick wanting some attention right fucking now.

“Yeah, that model’s awful hot, ain’t she?” my muscular assistant said with an appreciative whistle.  “Man, I’d like to take that for a fuckin’ ride, wouldn’t you?”  He stopped then, his uni-brow knitted in apparent confusion.  “But she ain’t real, is she?  I mean, she’s, like, you know, a special effect, right?”

"It's a polymer," I heard myself say in a droning voice, my eyes fixed upon the newly redesigned model ‘vette, "a carbon/rubber elastomer mesh just a few molecules thick, and thirty times denser than nylon.  It rides over the skin, clinging to its surface by means of static electricity, hiding small imperfections.  You spray it on with an airbrush.  The strands flatten out when heated, creating the appearance of a smooth, shiny surface."

“Holy shit, Professor,” he said, awed at my acumen, “you can tell all that from a picture?”

“I, uh…read about it somewhere,” I said, somewhat surprised that I could lie so well, what with ninety-five percent of my brain focused on the shiny woman who still haunted my dreams.

“So that’s a real babe then?”  He stopped again, considering the implications.  “Uh, Professor,” he said slowly, but with a slight edge to his voice that even my befuddled brain couldn’t miss, “could I, uh, have my magazine back?”

“Uh, sure,” I said, reluctantly handing the glossy magazine back to him, reluctantly because I knew what was going to happen next.  He quickly turned and strode stiffly to the bathroom, magazine in hand, so that he could jerk off to the image of my wife.

I stood there in the parking lot, stunned.  The fat cocksucker had taken it public.  He had stolen my invention from me, and was now pimping pictures of the woman he had also stolen from me, for people to fucking gawp at.  In a daze I shambled out of the shop’s parking lot, and made my way shakily down the street, to buy my own copy of that which I used to see for free.

Three months, I thought, almost delirious, like an alky looking through a liquor store window, his tenuous grasp on sobriety slipping.  Exactly ninety motherfucking days, and she comes roaring back into my life.  Day by day I had been rebuilding my life, one day at a goddamn time, with no word from her, no phone calls, no letter, no nothing!  Recovering from the loss of my ‘vette had not been easy, and was in fact made doubly unbearable for she had done more than just leave me, she had also erased practically all evidence of our relationship.

It was while in the throes of my freshly-dumped, drunken haze that I discovered that every last picture of her, every letter, video, jpg, mpeg, and more, had been systematically removed from the house.  She must have had a busy night, what with fucking me into a sound sleep, and then completely obliterating herself from my life.  My laptop was wiped clean of her, our wedding pictures were gone, even my wallet had been stripped.  All I had left of her was the picture of her that I’d kept in my toolbox, leaning against Justine, her beautiful body barely clothed in the skimpiest of string bikinis.

I’d theorized about it endlessly, about why she had done it.  Was it because she had known I was addicted to her, and being an addict herself had apparently decided that making me go cold turkey was the best option? Or was there perhaps a more sinister motive?  Perhaps that fat cocksucker had made her do it, had ordered her to remove all traces of her existence so that I would be unable to make some claim against him.

There was so much I didn’t know; so much I would never know.  Did Doña Clara know of their relationship?  Did she condone it?  Was she perhaps even a part of it?  Or was she, like so many trophy wives, simply turning a blind eye to her husband’s sexual peccadilloes, a not unreasonable price to pay for a life of comfort.

There wasn’t a line inside the liquor store when I got there for the simple reason that they were already sold out.  “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” said the proprietor, distractedly looking at his own copy.  “Sold ever’ last one of ‘em in under half an’ hour.  Oh, man, she can’t be real,” he continued, more to himself than me, “she’s gotta be a…”  I left quickly, not wishing to discuss the technical aspects of science to someone who was drooling over a picture of my ex-wife.

“Hey, man,” hissed a scruffy guy leaning against the back of an ancient Ford station wagon in the liquor store’s parking lot.  “You looking for that magazine?  The one with that hot model?”

My stomach rolled over, hearing this little bastard talking about my wife like that.  “Yeah,” I replied sickly, “You know where I can find a copy?”  Of course I already knew what the answer would be.

“Got some right here, my man,” he beamed, reaching into the back of his p.o.s.  “Only twenty bucks apiece.  How many you want?”

I exhaled a measured breath, and with shaking fingers pressed a twenty into his greasy palm.

“Man, she’s a beaut’, ain’t she?” he said, as I took the magazine from him.  “How’d you like to take her for a spin, huh?”

I walked away, clutching the magazine to my chest, as a bunch of guys began pushing past me, queuing up to get their own copies.

I hurriedly made it back to the shop.  Minnie looked up from the counter as I entered, holding her own copy of Custom Rod.  “Roddy,” she said breathlessly, her fetching funbags ready to burst out of her tight halter top, “have you seen this bird in the magazine?  D’yer think she’s…?”  I ran up the stairs to my loft, shutting the door behind me, hopefully shutting out the world as well.

The loft came with the job, and though it was by no means luxurious, it was quite spacious, easily accommodating what few possessions I had left after the mega yard sale I’d had.  At practically any other time in American history, getting the house in a divorce would be quite a coup, but since a bevy of crooked bankers had decided to plunge the world into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, I ended up owing more money than I had bought it for, even with the improvements Yvette and I had made.  I drove away with little more than a few pots and pans, and some furniture, having signed over Don Carlos’s check to cover my indebtedness.  I could’ve just walked away from it all, like so many other of my fellow citizens, but my plight was not brought on by the greed of a few fat cat financiers, but rather by my own greed – much like the shot to the back of the head I’d taken from that baseball, I felt it was my karma.  I deserved whatever bad shit happened to me.

Trembling slightly I grabbed a soda from the battered Frigidaire, and sat down at my chipped dining table, pushing aside dirty cereal bowls and assorted Taco Bell wrappers in order to make room to read.  Her face in close-up was on the cover, her eyes closed, her head demurely shifted down and to the left.  With shaking fingers I opened the magazine, unsure and uncaring whether I was breathing anymore, quickly flipped past inane articles about do-it-yourself flame-jobs and front-end makeovers, and stopped when I found the article about her.  It was entitled Next Year’s Model.

There were exactly fifteen pages devoted to her, each one posed against a different classic car, each time coated in a different color, moving forward through the years: there was a red 1953 Ferrari that I recognized as belonging to Don Carlos, a two-tone mint-green and white 1959 Edsel, a stainless steel 1981 DeLorean, and lastly, a black 2010 Dodge Viper.  I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was, how sleek and shiny, at times her finish more lustrous than the car she lay upon.  But it was more than just paint and polymer that drew the viewer in; it was the innate sensuality of the model.  In every photograph her eyes were closed, her face always turned slightly away, not coyly, not teasing, but as though she were in a state of perpetual bliss, which I knew for a fact she was.

The text of the article, if anyone bothered to read it, had to do with timeless elegance, and that beauty was the single unifying constant of car lovers throughout the history of the automobile.  The prose was clean and simple, and I read every single word of it, if only so that I could linger on each page for as long as possible, drinking in her incredible beauty, at least until I got to the centerfold, at which point I realized that I had become drunk upon it.

“My God…” I whispered to the empty loft.  It was the single most evocative image I had ever seen.  She lay upon the hood of a blue 1956 C1 Chevrolet Corvette, her legs slightly spread, her lithe arms stretched downward toward the headlights, her fingers extended as though she were on the edge of a mind-numbing orgasm.  Aside from obvious differences of make and model, this gatefold image of my ex-wife differed from all of the others in two important respects: her eyes were open, revealing, not blue contact lenses as I would have thought, but rather very specialized lenses, gridded like car headlamps; and the other thing, which I found even more unsettling than her eyes, was her name, painted on just above the line of her chrome bikini bottom, an exact reproduction of the classic logo – ‘vette.

I hadn’t realized I was crying until the first teardrop splashed upon the page, to be followed quickly by many others.  But my tears were not due to sadness, which had been my constant companion for every one of the last ninety days, but rather her unimaginable beauty.  I had grown up on Playboy and Penthouse, and had seen as many publications and photographs devoted to feminine beauty as every other man in the industrialized world, but there was nothing to rival this.  My ‘vette, had become, or had evolved into, the most desirable woman who had ever lived.

I retired to my Salvation Army couch and opened up my laptop, hoping to find out as much as I could about her now, and quickly discovered that I wasn’t the first.  Her picture was already at the top of Yahoo’s splash page, the caption underneath asking, ‘Who is ‘vette?’, and on the side of the page, where the ten most popular searches are categorized, every last one of them had something to do with the unbelievably magnificent woman who had once belonged to me.

I turned on the TV, the rest of my workday having become a trifling matter; Vinny could lock up, if he wasn’t still in the john, checking his dipstick.  Sure enough, every news channel was talking about her: was she real, was she just an artfully crafted piece of computer animation, why America was so hot for ‘vette, and why was Custom Rod magazine not returning phone calls?

I watched, more fascinated than perhaps any other viewer, as news anchors and infobabes prattled on endlessly about her.  But as I watched, it became clear to me that there was much more to this hubbub than a few pictures in an obscure hot rod magazine, because something much larger was happening – Shiny Friday had begun.

It had started at noon, Mountain Standard Time, and was perhaps the single most massive media campaign ever conceived.  It launched quietly, when every single electronic billboard in the country started simultaneously flashing moving images of Yvette.  She danced, strolled, twirled, and jumped, with rapid-fire editing showing her coated in every color of the rainbow, as well as her original Barbie-doll coloration, orchidaceous lips and all.  In that exact same instant, millions of people became acquainted with my bride, and everyone wanted more.

They got more.  Thirty minutes later, those exact same images, and more, became available for download on the Internet, resulting in massive system crashes as everyone electronically jostled for a piece of my ex-wife.

At 1:00 PM, posters of her went on sale on Amazon.com, and it was only incredible foresight on their part that kept them online, for they were flooded with more orders than anyone had seen since Farrah Fawcett’s nipple pic, which Yvette would ultimately outsell by more than ten to one.

At 2:00 PM the campaign shifted to the print media, with the special edition of Custom Rod (a name I was really beginning to hate) hitting the news stands, the timing of which having been as rigidly controlled as a Harry Potter book release.

And at 3:00 PM it became official, when commercials began saturating the public airwaves.  Tens of millions of US citizens became entranced by the gleaming, flawless face of the most tantalizing and captivating woman who had ever drawn breath, as she resolved out of nothing on their television screens, a Barbie doll come to life in their living rooms.  She simply opened her brilliant blue eyes, and whispered the single word that took the nation, and ultimately the world, by storm – Blaze!

I watched in dread fascination as they replayed the commercial over and over, gobs of free advertising for a product that no one seemed to know anything about.  The phone rang.  “Roddy, are you watching the telly?”

“Oh, yes, Minnie, I am,” I answered, my voice a dry whisper, my eyes fixed on my 42-inch flat screen TV, one of the few items I’d been able to hang on to in my post-divorce poverty.  “Me and just about everybody else in the world, I suspect.”

“Well, I’m tired of listening to this tripe on the radio,” I was surprised she didn’t say ‘wireless’.  “Can I pop up?”

“Yeah, come on,” I said distractedly, for CNN had backtracked, and was now going through one of the billboard feeds frame by frame, and I was sure several million people were busily discovering the sound of one hand fapping.

There came two quick raps at the door, which then opened to admit my curious co-worker.  Minnie Cooper, so named by her father in homage to Alec Issigonis’s everyday runabout, is one the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, and was someone I generally went to great pains to avoid, due to her impressive bust that reminded me so much of Yvette’s.  Once married and divorced, she’d kept her maiden name all through her marriage (‘because it really is a talking point, luv’), and despite being British she is an excellent cook, judging by the brownies and cheesecakes she sometimes brings in for me.

She made a beeline in my direction, unfazed by the general squalor of the bachelor pad in which I lived my less than wonderful life.  She plopped down beside me on the couch, her awe-inspiring cleavage, her shapely hose-clad legs, and the heady scent of her perfume vying with CNN for my attention.  “What’s happening, Roddy?”

“Buh…” I blurted, damn near giving my eyeballs a hernia as I pulled them up and away from the majestic vista below and to my right, “…b-big advertising campaign.  Something called Blaze.”  At that moment, they cut again to the Blaze commercial, and with another Herculean effort I pulled my eyes away from the image on the screen so that I could look at my unanticipated guest.  The look of awe upon her face was priceless, rather like the expression people have when seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.  She got slowly up from the couch, and despite her being half again my age it was all I could do not to stick my face in her chest.

“My…God…Roddy,” she said, moving as though in a trance toward the TV, brushing a lock of wavy red hair from her face, “she’s so…beautiful.  D’yer think she’s real?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said with a sigh and a rueful smile, “she’s real.”  I watched her watch the ‘vette I used to have.  She was spellbound, mesmerized by the unbelievable beauty of the latex-coated woman.  But there was more to her slack and dazed expression than simple amazement, there was admiration and envy mixed up in there, too.  

I don’t know if it’s cultural, or if it’s hardwired into them, but pretty much every woman wants to be beautiful.  Of course they deny it, and say that it’s not that important, and that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.  But it has been my experience that if you tell a woman she’s beautiful – not hot, not babelicious – but tell her that she is beautiful, her face will invariably light up with the kind of smile that never fails to send a man’s blood flow southward.

‘I want to be beautiful,’ Yvette had said on the last day of our marriage, and had thrown away everything she loved to be everything she’d always wanted to be, something that I thought she already was.  Minnie was beautiful too, but she was what is often referred to as ‘closing time beautiful’, the kind of woman a man will approach only after all the young hotties have hit the road, and the choice comes down to his fist, or the older talent that’s still hanging on.

And Minnie was still hanging on, as her overdone makeup, short tight skirts, high heels, shoulder-length smoky red hair, and ample bosom could attest.  At forty-seven Minnie was still a looker, and if I were still alive I would probably take a run at her myself (as much as I might say that I went to great pains to avoid her, the truth is that I sometimes found myself going up to the front of the shop for no good reason, just so I could take a quick gander at her bosom, which she never failed to display to its utmost).  I knew she didn’t have a steady beau, but I also knew that she didn’t lack for male companionship either.  She wasn’t a slut or a skank.  She simply loved men, and loved being appreciated for her considerable physical charms, charms that would only be more difficult to maintain as the years went by.

“Blaze,” she whispered along with my entrancing ex-wife as the shiny image faded out again.  “What d’yer reckon it is?” she asked quizzically, turning her face toward me, her bountiful breasts outlined by the TV screen rising and falling more rapidly than is normal for a woman not engaged in strenuous exercise.  “Perfume, I’ll bet.”

The news blatherers came back on, and continued asking the same question that Minnie had: What is Blaze?  Was it perfume, makeup, a new model of car, a floor wax, what?  But I was no longer paying any attention to them, for my eyes were locked on Minnie’s heaving breasts, breasts so very like the ones that I had loved, breasts that were now blazing with a light sheen of perspiration, aided by the glow from the TV screen.

“Oh…my…God…” I said slowly, my mind racing, neurons snapping like banners in a high wind.  

“Erm, Roddy…?” she began hesitantly, bringing her arms up to cover her marvelous melons, which only served to push them higher up her chest.

“Oh, no,” I whispered, rising to my feet.  I turned and walked over to the window, noticing for the first time the electronic billboard by the bus stop across the street, my former wife dancing and spinning about for a group of teenagers who would probably wait there all day rather than get on a fucking bus.  “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, laying my greasy forehead against the warm windowpane.  “Oh, dear God, no…”

“Roddy…?”  I could hear the rising alarm in her voice, worried, perhaps, that I was about to go mental on her.

Hey, dude, my inner voice rasped, scratchy with disuse, keep it together.  Don’t freak out the nice lady with the big boobs.  I sighed and turned back around, and sat my underfed ass on the brick windowsill.  “I know what Blaze is, Minnie,” I said tonelessly, putting my hands on my thighs for support.  “Everything will change.”

She hugged her arms tighter to her, pushing her boobs even higher, damn near making a shelf that she could rest her chin upon, and giving me the kind of look that everyone gave Kevin McCarthy before pods from outer space took over the world.  She opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted but the chiming of my mantel clock, a little something I’d picked up at a local pawn shop – a not so subtle reminder of the pitfalls of technology.  It chimed four times, and as though Pavlov himself had trained me, I automatically looked back to the TV, Minnie following suit, both of us wondering what else lay in store.

Yvette resolved into focus again, a tight close-up, limited solely to her eyes.  They were open, the super-saturated blue contacts she was wearing filling the screen, making it impossible for the viewer to look away.  With agonizing slowness the camera pulled back, revealing the rest of her face; a Barbie doll again.  There was no sound, and it was at that moment that I realized there wasn’t any sound: no cars honking, no yelling, no nothing, as though everyone in the city, perhaps even the entire state, had stopped in their tracks and was waiting for what was about to happen next. 

She didn’t speak, as I had expected she would.  No, it was time to up the ante, which was done by the simple expedient of pulling the camera slowly back and upwards, to reveal, not just my ‘vette, but quite literally hundreds of ‘vettes, arrayed in a grid formation against a white background: glistening greens, radiant reds, and bright blues.  The purity of their colors stood out so starkly against the white, that it caused the viewer to experience a momentary sensory overload.  And as if that weren’t enough, the tips of their fiber-optic hair began to glow in matching color, softly at first, and then more brightly, until they fused into white light, washing out the figures on the screen entirely, whereupon dark gray letters faded up on the screen, a single word, then another appearing beneath the first, and then another still:

BLAZE

HEADLIGHTS

10.22.10

The lettering washed out one final time, to be replaced by a countdown clock, which began silently clicking off the seconds – 2:59:59.  In just under three hours a very perplexed America would discover what Blaze was.  Little did they know it was already too late.

“Roddy,” said Minnie breathlessly, her impressive bosom heaving all the more, the white plastic o-rings that joined the bodice of her blue skintight dress to the straps that went around her neck straining under the load, “what the bloody hell was that?”

“The end of one era, and the beginning of another,” I said quietly.

“Huh?”

“Would you have dinner with me tonight, Minnie?”

*    *    *    *    *    *

Every major news organization scrambled once that last piece of the puzzle was revealed, and no one appeared to know what it meant.  I asked Minnie to keep a watch on the news while I shaved and showered away three months of general neglect, something she was only too happy to do, as it gave her that much more opportunity to watch my TV and gaze in wonder at the perfected woman who had captivated the country.

I exited my bedroom at 4:55, a little paler than my old self, my clothes hanging a little looser, and even though I figured nothing good would come of this evening, I knew I had to go to Headlights, to see it for myself.  “Anything happen?”

“Bugger all, luv,” she replied, nursing the beer I’d offered her, staring raptly at the screen, “unless you count YouTube goin’ tits up.”

“Holy shit!” I said, appropriately wowed.  I took a seat next to her, and accepted a much needed drink of her beer.  “What happened?”

She started to tell me, but as she did so, the news commentators cut to the video that had sent YouTube crashing down in flames – video shot not ten miles from where we were sitting, and that, if one cared to notice, had the back of my head in it.  I watched, as perhaps untold millions of others were watching, as a gorgeous, topless, dark-haired mannequin came to life, grabbed a nicely-chested blonde salesgirl, and shoved her tongue down her throat.

I glanced over at Minnie to find her substantial bosom heaving again, distended nipples poking through the thin fabric of her dress, her expression slack and dumbfounded, and I wondered just how representative her reaction to Yvette might be.  That unspoken question was answered just seconds later when I heard the male news anchor address the typically hot infobabe to his left, her nipples also hard enough to cut glass, “Well, Candy, what do you think of ‘vette?”

The blonde anchorette looked dazedly up from her desk-mounted feed, absentmindedly licked her own glossy lips and said, trancelike, “I think she’s beautiful.”

I felt a hand on my thigh, gripping it with almost the same force that Yvette had done on our final ride home, only Minnie wasn’t scared or anxious, she was incredibly turned-on.  “Roddy…?” she said, looking up at me, her startlingly green eyes gazing lasciviously into mine.

“Uh…” I said with my usual debonair flair, “I think we’d better go.”

To Be Continued…

Comments, feedback, or pictures of really big boobies always appreciated.

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