Free Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito Page B

neither premeditation nor spite, to lead the way.
    At first, Clovis tried to stop Attila, but he quickly remembered that she somehow always knew where she was going. He halted her just long enough to mount, and they were off, the slush of Attila’s legs through the acorns making it impossible for Clovis to hear anything else.
    So, Clovis was immensely pleased when he began to hear strains of song occasionally rending through the trees, even above the racket of Attila’s step. Before long, it filled the air around him, music of such poignant exaltation that his heart blossomed even as it burned. He spied a clearing ahead and brought Attila to a halt, fearing to interrupt such impassioned heartsong. Dismounting, he found the layers of acorns to be thinner here, a deferent shock wave to the clearing. He crept ahead, keeping a large tree at the edge of the clearing in front of him. Once he had reached and hidden himself behind the tree, he cautiously peered around it, fully expecting the sunshine herself to be singing naked in a shower of god-begotten rainbows.
    But even this magniloquence could not have prepared Clovis for the onslaught of love that greeted his eyes so wide. There, deep in the center of the clearing, was a monumental king oak, towering against an abundance of open sky, stretching its limbs to the highest heavens in forms known only to those who know what it is to dance with abandon. But this is not even what Clovis saw. The vision that became Clovis for a split second before cleaving into past and future was a thrusting bucking writhe of nymphomania. But mind ye puritans,
this was no pornographic grab-and-grope Wesson-oil free-for-all. This was Dionysia, of the deity, sacred lust, a perfectly contoured and immeasurably rhythmic orgy of dryads, a soaring aura of sexuality and song. And then it was gone, vanishing like lightning, but not without breezing a kiss against the face of its inadvertent voyeur. Clovis was left agape, and he would remain so for some time thereafter, leaning against the tree behind which he’d hidden, gazing at the tremendous trunk of the king oak, mesmerized by the memory of the moment.
    Indeed, he may well have stayed that way for the rest of his life if a nimble little gnome no taller than his thighs and sporting a red toadstool cap hadn’t tugged on Clovis’s pants leg and, grinning like a psychotic ringmaster, warned, “Be thee ware, weary wanderer, and touch not the bough of mistletoe,” just before popping a mushroom into his mouth, touching the side of his nose, and somersaulting away.
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    30 P RIOR TO THE invention of the lightning rod, church towers were struck by lightning with embarrassing frequency. As bell towers were frequently the tallest structures in the skyline, this should not be surprising to modern minds. To eighteenth-century churchgoers, however, who took Jesus at his word when he remarked, “I beheld Lucifer as lightning fall from heaven,” it implied that God the omnipotent was unable to protect his own houses of worship from Lucifer’s lightning. Such majestic impotence fueled rumors that the church was in fact worshipping a false god, a demiurge whose half-assed contrivances were supremely susceptible to the prankish electricity of the true God’s divine lightning.
    As it turns out, popular opinion so embraced this Gnostic heresy that lightning strikes are today deemed “acts of God” in the legal sense. Tornadoes, too, are generally considered acts of God by insurers, necessitating the purchase of additional tornado insurance policies if one hopes to be financially protected from the wrath of God. Few outside of Kansas fret over tornadoes when purchasing insurance, and this was certainly the case in Normal, Illinois. Even State Mutual Insurance, one of the largest insurers in the nation and Dave’s employer, did not have tornado insurance. Unfortunately, most of the campus of their national headquarters