"Teasers 2" by Vickie Tern(VickieTern@aol.com). I first met Robert Browning under the sterile tutelage of a nun whom I shall refer to as Sister Mary Poetry. I was shocked that semester by the comment of one of my classmates who said that what SMP really needed was to get laid. I met her at a subsequent class reunion and discovered that several years after I graduated, Sister left the convent and did indeed get laid - probably more often and with richer variety than almost anyone we have read about on a.s.s. However, by the time of our reunion, she had a Ph.D. in English, was a Little League mother driving a station wagon, and was happily married to her third husband.

Anyway, under her instruction I discovered that Robert Browning was boring as hell, and I could not understand what Elizabeth Barrett saw in him that would make her want to count the ways she loved him. Then in college I had an English prof who read "My Last Duchess" out loud to me correctly, and I discovered that it was a magnificent but concise revelation of the character of the person who was describing his previous wife in that poem. All of this has nothing to do with the present set of "teasers," except that some of them reminded me strongly of Browning's poetry. That is, I thought at first that I was reading a really simple description, and then suddenly I realized I was reading about something a lot different and substantially more shocking than had been my original impression.

This author does something similar with this set of "teasers." They vary greatly in quality and in subject matter, but they generally have a narrator telling a story in which a sudden twist occurs that left me with a completely different impression than I thought I was going to get from the story.

I like these teasers. I like them so much that I am going to proclaim the Third Annual Celestial Writing Contest. The rules are that the story must in some way be about sex and must be restricted to 500 words or less. In addition, the story should include some sort of unusual twist - like the unexpected self-revelation in "My Last Duchess" or the surprise endings in several of Vickie Tern's or Deirdre's stories. If you wish, you can submit several super-short stories together (as this author has now done on two occasions), or you can post them separately under separate titles. However, I'll give first prize to the best STORY, not to the best collection. The deadline for submissions will be June 3, which my calendar tells me is the date on which the Catholic Church will celebrate the feast of St. Charles Lwanga and his companions.