Free Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito

functions as a cease-and-flee command from the
brain, as when you touch a flame. Clearly, there is no logic in ceasing or fleeing the birthing process, and besides,
all
reproductive functions give pleasure. Sex, childbirth, and breast-feeding all flood the brain with oxytocin, and more fundamentally, childbirth is a uterine contraction and an orgasm is a uterine contraction. Whether it’s perceived as pleasure or pain has everything to do with context. In a culture that cannot fathom orgasm as anything more than a pornographic genital spasm, the sensations of birth are so unprecedented and overwhelming that they elicit fear, are resisted, and are thereby experienced as pain. Tradition, too, creates an expectation of pain, and the iatrogenic hospital setting of bright lights; legs spread in cold steel stirrups; and frantic, impersonal, imperious strangers in masks only contributes to a perception of the situation as more like clinical rape than a celebration of new life. Absent conditions in which institutional efficiency takes precedence over the unpredictable rhythms of maternity, the midwife said, and absent a culture that instructs its members that being alive and the processes of life are something to be embarrassed about, and it becomes understandable how the agony could become the ecstasy.
    Dr. Rip Blossom scoffed off in a huff, and later had her arrested for practicing medicine without a license.
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    28 S IXTY-FOUR PERCENT of humans grow their hair in a clockwise whorl from the crown of their head. Thus, it was not improbable that the emerging crown of Bridget’s daughter revealed a clockwise whorl of matted hair. When the oblivious
Dave Wildhack observed this, however, he immediately looked up and confirmed that the tornado was spinning clockwise away. To him, it seemed a staggering coincidence.
    Dave, drunk off of Bridget’s energy and hence the only prairie dog brave enough to peek above the pews, watched in fearless awe as the tornado abruptly veered toward the interstate, tripping over the west wall and kicking most of it over. When this commotion was complete, Dave looked down and saw that the child’s head was now completely free and her immense elfin eyes were gazing up at him. Taking care to protect both mother and child from any lingering projectiles, Dave gingerly tucked a finger under her emerging armpit and slithered her loose. Bridget’s body went limp with release and she burst out laughing. Dave, still unsettled by the orgasmic birth, did his best to disregard this. He lifted his daughter and smiled a momentous grin, to which she responded by delicately hacking a tiny lungful of amniotic fluid in his face.
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    29 T HE HAIL that had heralded the tornado was lavish, and the ensuing windstorm made sure that a fair proportion of the windows in town met a hailstone fate. When the tornado finally departed, the air at ground level found itself considerably cooled, so much so that a mist was rising from the two-inch-deep cover of hail as water vapor condensed from the local atmosphere. Gradually but unhesitatingly, the hail fog tiptoed its way into every alley and blown-apart building, taking great care not to startle anyone further, until it had covered the town with its fantasian ambience.
    The hail fog gently softened the whimpers and sobs of the
huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and a certain naked congregation was grateful for the relative privacy the mist afforded. The sky, minutes earlier a churning hell of blackened clouds bristling with lightning, now shone with the cerulean exuberance of early spring.
    Minutes passed, and the traumatized people of Normal began to stir, calling out names and responding to each other’s cries. Those who were relatively uninjured or unstupefied stepped into temporary leadership positions and set about organizing rescue and first aid activities. Soon, the decapitated anthill that was Normal, Illinois, began to pull itself together,