Read Skinny Legs and All for Free Online

surrounded the billboards had succeeded in releasing her doppelgänger, old Jezebel, from her rouge jar.
    “Bring Him the Bleeding Head of the Whore,” read one sign, and that one really escalated the willies, because Ellen Cherry was positive that the “Whore” to whom the sign referred was Jezebel.
    She had outgrown her susceptibility to car sickness, but she squinted anyway, intending to employ the eye game as a distraction. Instantly, the rough, irregular contours of the sandstone landscape, the interlocking configurations of mesa, gully, and natural chimney, began to soften, to sift, to close off the background space so that the countryside was projected forward, millimeters in front of Ellen Cherry’s nose, where it presented itself as laced webs of scrambled color. Alas, since the jumbled color was both powdery and decorative—it tended toward salmon, grape, and ivory—it was even more evocative of cosmetics than when it was in hard-edged perspective, and Jezebel’s presence was reinforced rather than denied. The artist called off the game.
    Soon after arriving in Seattle, the incident at VCU still painfully alive in her mind, she had procured a bible and gone searching for the lurid details of Jezebel’s debauchery. From Sunday school, she had a hazy picture of a thoroughly immoral harlot who costumed herself like a rock ’n’ roll vamp, but she couldn’t recall a single biographical fact. Imagine her surprise when the Old Testament Book of Kings informed her that Jezebel was a royal—and faithful—wife.
    Actually, the biblical story of Jezebel is only a few sentences long. It seems that she and her husband, King Ahab, were accused of practicing idolatry by a young right-winger named Jehu, who had designs on the throne. Earlier, Ahab had acquired by devious means some real estate belonging to a neighbor, and Jezebel was said to have sparked a rumor that led to the neighbor’s death. Ahab, a Hebrew, was king of northern Israel; Jezebel was the daughter of a king and queen of Phoenicia. Being a foreigner, she didn’t wholeheartedly worship the god of the Jews, which may have led to the “idolatry” charges, but aside from loyally supporting her husband in his suspect land deal, she apparently had been as properly behaved as, say, Queen Elizabeth.
    Then, there was a curious and fatal episode. The ambitious Jehu, having secretly murdered Jezebel’s son (Ahab, in the meantime, had died in battle), came riding up to the palace. When Jezebel heard of his unscheduled visit, she, according to Scripture, “painted her face and tired her head and looked out a window.” Another translation had her painting her “eyes” and “arranging her hair.” In any case, there she was, freshly groomed, looking out at the Hebrew rebel, when he incited “two or three eunuchs” to “throw her down.” “Her blood splattered the wall,” according to the gory old Bible, and Jehu left her in the courtyard for the dogs to eat while he went inside and helped himself to the wine. After a few flagons, he must have felt a prick of guilt because he ordered his flunkies to go bury her, but by that time the mutts had left nothing but “her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands.”
    Ellen Cherry was as mystified as the fly that wasted a day following a plastic horse. What had Queen Jezebel done to earn the distinction as our all-time treacherous slut? In the Bitch Hall of Fame, Jezebel had a room of her own; nay, an entire wing. For fixing her hair and applying makeup? Was it implied that she went to the window to flirt with the rebel warrior? And if so, was that so wicked that it should wreck her reputation for three thousand years? The trimillennial lash-bat?
    As Ellen Cherry walked the rain-rippled pavement of Seattle, bumbershooting from restaurant to restaurant in search of a job, she bore upon her back the weight of a skull, a pair of feet, and the palms of two hands. The nails of the feet were lacquered vermilion,