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56 Vic tims of the Wedding 14 Chamber with Music and the Stink of the Bull There were many children in the meadow on the hill. The man and woman had been fertile, and the children took the meadow like an invading army, in rags if they were wearing clothes at all, feral, lean, their eyes bright with hunger, their play, such as it was, like the play of young jackals, but each held an old spiral-bound notebook in his or her dirty hand, with the nub of a pencil attached to it by a length of greasy string. They moved across the meadow from every direction under a waning late autumn sun, as if they came there by pre-arrangement, as if there were a purpose in their convergence , a destination. At the center of the meadow the angel was on all fours; behind the angel, the daemon mounted and entered, though just what angelic orifice received him or her it is difficult to say. As neither creature was permanently gendered, all the apparatus was nonce and, so to speak, home-made. I still fail to see the pleasure in this, or any other purpose, the angel complained. You still aren’t doing it right, the daemon replied, laying another stripe on the angel’s buttocks with a golden cat-o-nine-tails. Haven’t you watched the humans enough yet to understand? Evidently not, the angel muttered, changing, through a mystical force of will, the nether configuration to resemble yet more closely what humankind had revealed. Perhaps we need more ichor, or some ectoplasm. Keep trying, the daemon grunted. So distracted were the mystical pair that they failed to notice the sharptoothed children surround them. They moved as quietly as ferrets through the grass and took up positions at all degrees around their objective. When they all were ready, they opened their notebooks and began to draw the most beautiful, accurate, and obscene illustrations of what they observed. ...

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