Savage Tales

refused to buy into it. Finally she found a window. It wouldn't open because nobody opened windows anymore, there were vents and ducts for that and too much air freed the mind and Emily didn't care FOOLS! FOOLS! she screamed and hurled the nearest piece of furniture through the window and it took two tosses with the reinforced glass and her spindly little girl arms but it broke because nothing can hold back freedom, as she once read on a human bumper sticker.
    The table she had hurled fell and fell several hundred feet to the tarmacadam below and fell into the goo as the sun scratched it to pieces. Wolverines and badgers wandered from the wasteland with mutant longings and chewed on the table as best they could and didn't hear Emily's madcap laugh from on high.
    Then like a hawk she was soaring, flying over the ruins and desert of leftover Canada away from the circuit boards and Chinese laborers and prison camps and rock band bars and the promenade. Nobody knew how she flew. She flew perhaps on the wings of human imagination which said that all was possible in a society that fed on corpulence and dissipation and inferiority and hierarchical terror and digits and quiet orders and Emily didn't care. Her armpits propelled her with a spray of pure dream-juice and it was an insecticide that would linger in the air for months and terraform the world below in ways none could imagine. Out of contact with the bandwidth and frequencies that told people how to view and the parking tickets gone, the cars gone even the smog of the highways gone forever.
    From above a giant pterodactyl saw Emily and winked with lust and Emily smiled too because that was all that remained of love and freedom and whistling.
    A silent missile from somewhere was coming. Who had done such a thing to an innocent girl and a beautiful dinosaur? Who was its target?
    It came and came and Emily saw but her winged friend did not and shrieked pure fear when the missile hit and took a giant chunk away and set the beast sputtering downward and left Emily in sadness. So she went away further, north, into the wild abyss lands of the former state of Alaska, now owned by the North Korean Democratic League of Beauty Freedom.
    Mutant polar bears danced below intoxicated on cheap Russian vodka and fed a stream of video game worlds that possessed them like ghosts of old legends.
    A giant radar dish smelt Emily out and fed the information to the polar bear units and rewrote the video games even then and aimed the bears from within at her. Their wings came out except for the young ones who had not completed that transformation and had to ride the unicorns and attack ever fiercely.
    They got her fast and roped her to one of them and took her down to the forts below. They took her to a room and tied her up and the doctor came in and gave her a feeding tube and taped her mouth shut for silence and the work began. They gave her some TV to keep her company but it was mainly the tube and the feedings ad infinitum that filled her like a tube and her skin expanded and bloated horribly and the little girl became a sasquatch of her former self her skin growing testosterone fur and her bones straining under the weight of her new dietary habits that seemed to come out of nowhere.
    After a month of this they clipped the dental floss that held her to the chair and let her go. She groaned horribly and sweated just to rise and had to crawl the first few miles until her brain started to get the hang of her new body.
    A bear found her fast and took her leg off before the rebels could get to her. They disposed of the bear which still yet refused to let go of that leg and they got her fitted up with a new Luke Skywalker style of limb that looked surprisingly fit compared to her otherwise horrible body. They got to work on this monstrous proposition feeding her beautiful pills that made her feel beautiful while she worked the blubber off and they built her new wings, extra genitals.
    She awoke almost adult now through all the horrible treatment and they'd fed her the experience tubes but she wanted the real of it, the real, not this phoniness and who was in charge here anyway, whose side are you on, this was the type of thing she asked.
    They led her into a bathroom that they said would be all hers and she said okay and locked the door and put the rubber stopper in the tub and filled it with hot water and the special 20th-century soap that turned the water into drinkable champagne and had her