Accordion serenade during the brief romantic interlude. Angela, a northern devotchka, and 1984.

Angela had her fingers in my belt loops; my gorge rose.

A yankee b*tch started on her accordion during the romantic interlude; my tongue was free, and hers so surly.

The yankee b*tch was not expressly a b*tch by point of being a yankee, but both a yankee and a b*tch separately; I could give her no sweat but what little flossed off during flight from her prattle.

Did I say my gorge rose?  Angie thought I was presenting it to her; and in the course of human events, there are such galactic misunderstandings, and what was meant to be pleasure or deepest love, becomes something much else and altogether different: 180 degrees aside, and completely out of proportion with the intent.

It felt like that scene in 1984 where the couple makes love set to the tones of the orders of the day for the proletariat, like sneaking away in prison, knowing full well later I would have to be re-educated, but of Angela, no education at all, lost in the bombed-out environs of the city, "smelling of bug spray", and the lips of her sex were like something of a deformed cabbage in the dust bin.

I could help myself more, I thought, and I was certain I could find no good where there was no good--all the more lost for even looking.

There was a solitary stray rose petal on one of Angela's plenty of stretch marks across the flanks of her belly punch, her savings account, the belly, and the rose petal some kind of declaration.