CREEPING APHRODITE
By Charlotte Rice

In the world of cholesterol, even the best arteries can get clogged. Charlotte Rice's character, Licorice Angelheart is the heroine of CREEPING APHRODITE. Licorice wants to be an English professor, but for now has to be content working in a hospital as a unit clerk. She is cultured, well-read and has a vocabulary to the extent which would constipate Webster. Licorice wants a man to help her escape living under the roof of her lawyer father and bacchic step-mother, both of whom do not recognize Licorice as a worthy human being because she is morbidly obese.
She lives in a small town, where the beernut is a natural element and the cigarette is the national pasttime of the man with the blue collar and the red neck. Her treks to the Habitual Victual, the corner grocery store, and her aspirations of finishing her master's degree and pursuing her doctorate give Licorice hope of a fulfilled life. Among the hilarious cast of characters include:

Miracle "Big Hands" Mascaux: the lesbian nurses' aide at Honeydung Hospital, where Licorice works
Keatson Williardingsmithro Angelheart: Licorice's father and a hot-shot ambulance chaser
Ambrosia-Prudence: Licorice's stepmother who drives a lavendar Camaro and loves to drink and gamble
Dr. Zendel: the physician with whom Licorice is in love and shamelessly pursues
The Associate: Licorice's reprimander and Keatson's protege
Stanley: the red-haired Jewish bartender who works at the Happy Hangover

About the Author

Charlotte Rice has been a contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and Seventeen, among other magazines, and is the author of My Heroes Have Always Been Dead. Rice freelances regularly with Forum News magazine and was the 1999 editor for Spectra magazine. She was the recipient of the Buckner Writing Award for 1999 as well as winner of the 1999 Shreveport Regional Arts Council Fellowship.

CREEPING APHRODITE
By Charlotte Rice
ISBN: 0-9674411-0-2
Price: $12.00
Publication date: January 2000

Chapter 1

Licorice Teven Angelheart ate all she wanted and never weighed over 300 pounds. Her auburn hair was a burned bakery housing a coiled sweet-roll of a bun, positioned with rusted bobby-pins and swirled with flecks of chocolate from Licorice's fingers. The blue hospital scrubs gulped and expanded with each toilsome breath as the tennis shoes crouched in extremis under the elephantine foldings of her flabbed feet.
The smell of incontinence filled the air of the Honeydung Hospital and wafted lazily through Licorice's nose, blended with the slightest tinge of nursing home flavor. Plucked from its wrapper, the last cookie whisked through a pair of gaping pink lips and was subjected to oscular mutilation.
Sighing with pleasure, Licorice pondered the universal purpose of her twenty-three old mouth and pronounced it but a glorious window to the stomach. Only an esophagus, lined with oily remnants of meringue, served as the great Gastric Tour Guide. She was a human vacuum-cleaner who had been known to give back a plate with such illuminatory clarity that dishwashing liquid would have curdled greasily in shame.
Licorice swallowed and absently reached for another cookie. She was disappointed when her fingers clenched the wrapper, which seemed to be cowering in terror. Sitting at her desk, she decided to make out her grocery list for the evening. Grabbing a felt-tipped pen, she wiped her hand on her pants and wrote "cookie dough" on her palm.
She liked writing on her hand because she could slam it on a piece of paper and make copies if she needed to. Tapping the pen in thought, Licorice studied the culinary pharmacy the grocery store held and added "Piety pies." Piety Pies were Licorice's favorite snack; they were little coconut cakes shaped like crosses and drowning in dyed-pink icing. The cover of the box featured Omar the Pope, a big smiling black man wearing a purple miter and holding a pie, boasting, "Piety pies have been baptized!"
Licorice liked anything coconut. Even in high school, when times were particularly hard enough for the cafeteria to ice pieces of cornbread with coconut icing and try to pass it off as cake, Licorice had eaten every bite and had begged the recipe from the visionary mind of the kitchen worker on the last day of school.
Her mother Darla Teven Angelheart, had named Licorice after her favorite candy, which she had craved so much during her pregnancy with Licorice that there was a garbage bag full of the empty candy wrappers still lounging in the garage somewhere in all its gooey triumph. Darla Teven was now dead of a heart attack resulting from too many pastry-leftovers in her arteries at the clogged age of forty-two, leaving Licorice, her father Keaton, and her mother Ambrosia-Prudence in the big house on Complete Street together.
Licorice had always been overweight and didn't try to shield her binging. She knew cookie dough like she knew brownie-dough, and that was a recipe that had been etched in her mind at the precocious age of four. She was content with her eating, although Keatson and Ambrosia were disgusted by it and were always trying to get her to go to various fat farms, which were suggestions she decided to take as flattery.
Wedged like a great Buddha into the small desk of the nurses' station, Licorice rearranged herself in her chair and decided to begin typing the doctors' orders into the computer from the warped patient charts. Licorice squinted at the base scrawlings the doctors considered penmanship and wondered whether any of them possesses opposable thumbs, much less the degrees they professed to have toilingly attained.
While agonizing over her pocket Rosetta Stone, a finger lost itself in the squashy mattress of her back and she whipped around to find herself face to face with a urinal. "Speak into the microphone," Miracle Mascaux demanded. Backing away from Licorice's catlike reflexes, Miracle curled her lip, furrowed her brow and swooped her leg in and outward and then in again, singing,

Viva....................Las Vegas!
Viva....................Las Vegas!
Viva.......viva.......Las VEGAS!

Miracle sang like a canary with a root canal. Her hair was cropped short with a long braid dangling down her back. She thrust her pelvis into the end of the desk before sinking into her chair crooning, "Thank you very much...you're beautiful." She smiled at Licorice. Miracle Mascaux's smile could wax a limousine and her laugh could drive it to the Oscar's. "Allow me to put all of the I.V. poles at half-mast mourning the atrocity of your performance," Licorice retorted.
"Aw, Licorice, if you only gave Elvis a chance I know you'd dig him! There's nothing comparable with those Jumpsuit Years, believe me --although Priscilla was pretty hot herself."
Licorice snorted. "I'd rather be ravished by the yardman than listen to that smutty musical confection. If Beethoven were alive today he'd have pursued his impending deafness with fervor."
Miracle laughed. "Licorice, don't start talking like that...I hate it when you get the Big Voice! I thought you only did that around Ambrosia-Prudence. Talk normal and leave out all the foot-long words, bitch."
Licorice sniffed. "You know once I get started, nothing can be done. It takes about an hour for the Big Voice --as you choose to call it-- to wear off. You'll simply have to tolerate it until it goes away."
Miracle slumped in her chair. "I've seen many ward clerks come through this hospital in my eighteen years, but nothing like you!"
"I should hope not." Licorice flipped the chart shut. "I do believe I'll need a beer after attempting to decipher this shameful cacography. Do you want to meet me at the Happy Hangover this afternoon for a drink?"
"Only if you're back to normal by then. I don't think I could listen to you ramble in Shakespeare-talk all night. But, I guess I could use a stout drink after changing diapers all day for these old farts. I'll meet you at five."

The Happy Hangover sat on the first level of one of the ornate buildings that lined the cobblestoned streets of downtown Honeydung. The building sat laughing to itself through chipped brick teeth and a mouthful of gargoyle. How many successes had it made out of men in suits, only to eke out a living for a man in zebra-striped spandex?
When it was built in 1910, it had certainly never expected it would house so many different industries. The fact that it's ground level was a bar again tickled the building. Of course, no one used the trap doors and hidden dumbwaiters that used to zip businessmen up and to the roof in the old days when the police barged in, arresting hookers and drunks, but it was thrilling that vomit would splat again and that fights would scuff the floors anew. The building didn't care...the abuse of it simply reassured it that it was alive.
Licorice arrived at the Happy Hangover at four-thirty, to find it empty. She swung the door open and looked around to see if Miracle had beaten her there. Rows of barstools lined the cracked gray counter and Hard Luck Woman droned and crackled from the complaining jukebox. Licorice slung her purse onto the counter and waited to be noticed by phantom bartender, whom she could hear yodeling to the song somewhere in the back.
As she exhaled impatiently, a man with a skull-covered banana tied around his head, wearing zebra-striped stretch pants grooved up from the back of the bar. The calves of his long legs were engulfed by huge black cowboy boots and his red hair stuck out of the bandana like blistered fingers. Pockmark scars decorated his cheeks and his pores were large picture windows sitting in the rough canvas of his face. He did not see Licorice enter the bar as he danced.
He dipped and spun like the runaway hands of a disco clock and slapped his head from side to side like an electric metronome. His arms were flags screaming voodoo mantra. He stopped in mid-jive when he saw licorice and, pointing a finger at her, lip-synched, "Baby, till you find your man-n-n-n!" Licorice smiled at him.
"Hey, Stanley, you big cheeseball," she said eyeing the pants. "I wonder how many cottonbolls selflessly gave their lives for that preposterous garment. Does the temple know about this?" Stanley secretly wanted to ask the same thing about Licorice's colossal scrubs, but he considered himself a gentleman, so he answered, "There are real, baby. Zebras, baby, and my rabbi helped me pick them out."
Biting his lip, he began dancing lasciviously. He grabbed his buttocks and swayed in and out until he was almost on the floor and then slowly raised himself back up again while running his fingers through the imaginary hair on his chest.
Licorice laughed. "Will you get me a beer before I call the cops?" "Oy, vey!" Stanley growled. He turned his back on her and grabbed a bottle of vodka, which he spilled like an expert into a tiny shot glass.
Whirling around, he smacked the glass in front of her and said, "Drink it, baby. It'll make you want me...I mean, really need me."
"Stanley, what you need is a rubber hose and a bottle of Vaseline."
Stanley raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like you've been spending too much time around Miracle, Liquorish Angelheart. I need love, too, you know."
"Well, pardon me for not having change for a nickel to buy you a liaison, Stanley."
"I swear, Licorice, your humor is as black as my heart. I'm too old and wise for this."
"Hmph. You're half-right."
Stanley was the tattooed wing of funky chicken. He rotated his neck in mock disgust and picked up the glass of vodka. Resting his elbows on the counter, he shot the vodka through a stirring straw and wiped his mouth with the ends of the bandana.
"Now that you're drunk, can I please have a beer or do I have to vault this countertop myself and get it?"
Stanley's mental picture of this was not one he wished to experience, so he fixed her a draft beer with ice and a straw. Licorice only drank cheap beer because expensive beer made her breath smell like skunk. In addition, cheap beer seemed to enhance her appetite in a more cultural aspect --the always craved exotic foods when drunk and, through such metaphysical enlightenment, tended to select items like macaroni-and-cheese with jalapeno instead of without, or carrot-cake ice cream instead of her usual chocolate.
She lit a cigarette and puffed contentedly while sipping her beer, her poised pinky fingers shamefully erect. She watched Stanley slither around the bar for a minute, but he was too busy wiping the counters and singing to himself to talk to her anymore. Gazing at the cigarette, Licorice thought back to her job at the Catacomb Nursing Home where she had worked undercover as a Decoy Smoker, hired to report employees smoking in the visitors' section of the home to the administration.
Licorice had sat reading Emile Zola's Germinal while keeping a watchful eye out for anyone wearing a name badge who dared venture out onto the patio. After two months of not reporting a single soul, they had asked that she sit with a cigarette burning so she would look more believable. She complied and soon began dragging lazily off of them while scouring the patio for potential prey.
Three months later, Licorice realized she loved cigarettes and had a phlegmy hacking-cough to prove her devotion. She sued Catacomb for the addiction and won two-hundred dollars in the suit, with which she immediately bought eleven cartons of cigarettes.
With grinding footsteps like a goose-stepping tractor, the lesbian plowed through the door. Licorice turned as Stanley shouted, "Hey, Big Hands," and saw Miracle heading for the barstool next to her.
"How dare you let people call you by that deplorable nickname," Licorice admonished. Miracle rolled her eyes. "I'm telling you, Lic. Cut it out..."
Stanley frowned. "Cut what out?"
Miracle cut her eyes at Licorice. "That damned Big Voice she been spoutin' all day at work."
"Well, she ain't been using it here," Stanley said. "Have you, Liquorish."
Licorice giggled. "Not much." She put an arm around Miracle.
"There's just something about you that brings out the little snot in me."
Miracle chuckled. "At least I've got your arm around me. Are you ready to be converted, or something? You'd be in good Hands..."
Licorice removed her arm and smacked Miracle's shoulder lightly.
"I'm sure you'll know the day has come when I walk in wearing spandex and a tear-away top." "Hey..." Stanley began, pointing to his shirt.
Miracle stroked her braided ponytail. "Every top is a tear-away to me."
"Well," said Licorice, flaring her nostrils from the force of the imminent Big Voice, "it would take at least half an hour for you to rip the yards of fabric from around my august girth; by that time, you probably would have climaxed in gal-l-l-vanized anticipation."
"Oh Licorice, you being out the little Id in me," said Miracle.
Licorice frowned. "And just what would you know about an id?"
"I remember the sixties...I know what animal passion is."
Stanley rapped the counter with his palms, keeping the pulse of the jukebox alive. "Ha!" he shouted. "I heard a guy say on the radio the other day that anyone who says they remember the sixties, wasn't there."
Licorice raised her hand and Stanley slapped it. "Good recall, Stan," she said. Miracle stuck her tongue out at both of them and sullenly sipped her beer.

Charlotte Rice
Photo by Tony Donaldson

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