Introduction by Thantasy:

Inspiration is where you find it.

In an email exchange with PK, one of the very best writers in the topic area of gynophagia, I explained that I have a very annoying habit of saying "I think," "I believe," or "it seems to me" when most people would simply say "I know." The roots of this habit are in my exposure to the principles of mitigated skepticism as articulated by David Hume, an eighteenth century Scottish philosopher. Hume's position was that all we can really "know" are the relationships between ideas (e.g., similarity, contiguity, and cause and effect) and that everything else in our heads is merely a matter of perception and intuition. This makes so much sense to me that I've internalized it to the point that it's become a part of my everyday speech.

PK replied, very wisely, that, while such skepticism may be valid in the purely intellectual sense, it has its practical limitations. I do agree with that sentiment, even though the intellectual is the only sense in which some of us can ever hope for purity. PK then went on to cite as an example, "We don't know the sun will rise tomorrow, but we generally don't go far wrong proceeding on the assumption that it will."

I thought about that and came up with the following very short story.

Thanta figured that the application she had received over the Internet for the International Yuletide Girl Roast (IYGR) was either a joke, or a very sophisticated form of role-play, or a ruse by one of her online admirers to get her address in order to send her a Christmas present.

She found filling out the form very arousing. She even got off on working out the formula for determining how many pounds she would dress out to. Doing so made her think of herself in very practical terms as meat. She never knew that mathematics could be so, um, interesting.

By the time she got to the contact information section of the application, she was so tired and horny that she accidentally put down her street address rather than her p.o. box address, which she used for snail mail correspondence with her online friends.

Thanta worked long days during the week, requiring her to get up by five in the morning, but on the weekends, she liked to turn her alarm clock to the wall, wake up when her body told her it was time to, and not get out of bed until saw daylight through her window.

On Friday, December 20, she was chloroformed in her sleep and spirited away to Barrow, Alaska, where she was placed in a room as exactly like her own bedroom as possible, except that her mirrors had been replaced with one-way glass, through which she was observed by Dan and Paul, the gourmets in charge of the menu for the IYGR.

When Thanta awoke. . . .

[Fast forward to the end of the story. Imagine something like Andy Warhol's movie SLEEP, if you like.]

Finally, in exasperation, Paul turned to Dan and said, "Isn't that lazy bundle of fluff ever going to get out of bed? She's been awake for nearly twelve hours and she's barely stirred."

Dan shook his head. "I don't know. If she lays in bed all day like that, her muscle tone must be like cooked spaghetti." He laughed and said, "Hey, there's an idea! We could boil her and pass her off as a pasta side dish."

With disappointment, Paul said, "If the subject doesn't have good muscle tone, the texture of the roast will be adversely affected. I say we should gas her and take her back home. She's missed her chance."

"You're right," Dan agreed. "Darn shame, though. She looks so juicy. And her answers to the essay questions sounded so enthusiastic. Reasonably well-written, too, though somewhat wordy."

"Yes," said Paul, turning on the gas that would put Thanta back to sleep. "She even worked out the dress-out weight formula perfectly. That can't have been easy for her, since she was a literature major."

"Well," Dan sighed, "perhaps over the course of a year, she'll change her habits. By the time we hold next year's Yuletide roast in Rio de Janeiro, maybe she'll have learned to get out of bed faster."

"I hope so," Paul agreed. "I certainly would like to see her succulent form being served as one of the main entrees."

"Amen," Dan said, licking his lips.

THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!