The Bodyguard ("Simple" -- story #26)

SIMPLE
by Michael Kroetch

The bodyguard’s mother thinks it will be nice for the girls with torn faces to be able to come to her bridal shower. She’s even said so to her husband-to-be. But she picked a bad time because she said it during yoga class when she was supposed to be doing the breath-of-fire to cleanse one of her chakras. She can’t remember which chakra the technique was supposed to be healing because while her Hindu love god was instructing the class about the matter she was busy looking at his lips and how they kept sensuously touching his teeth, stretching across the sharp, hard, white blades he used for eating.

Two of the torn girls who will be playing games at her bridal shower don’t have any lips. Not really. Instead they have waddings of skin that were taken from their ankles and placed where once they had lips. The process was supposed to make them have bigger, richer, more beautiful lips, but somehow it didn’t work out as intended. The bodyguard’s mother helped with the paperwork on that case, and so knows their doctor had successfully performed the procedure on hamsters prior to trying it on the two girls.

She looks again at her yoga man, at his lips and at his teeth as he talks more about the chakras in the bodies of her class. She is glad he smiled just a little bit ago when she told him about the torn girl and the bridal shower. She could tell by the lines in his forehead it disturbed him to be interrupted like that in front of everyone, but she knew from what his lips did that everything was okay. It was clear who was in control. It isn’t important that she can’t bend her body as much as everyone else because she can bend the teacher. Once she even showed him her secret blue gun, put it in his mouth, and told him to suck. She was glad he did not make a fuss. She hates it when people make a fuss. And that’s what she doesn’t want with her bridal shower—nothing fussy. Just a simple and traditional affair that won’t embarrass her in front of Jesus, but still something loose enough so the torn girls will be able to have fun.