The Lawless One
By:
February 26, 2010
In her redoubt atop Mount Lee, the Lawless One brooded. The ash-blonde warrior paced the ramparts, pausing now and again to shake her sexy meathooks at the skyline below. Stalking into her mountain lair’s gymnasium, she studied her face in a mirror, searching for signs of aging.
“Aphrodite, forgive me!” the Lawless One wailed. “I have failed in my mission!” Hurling her five feet and eleven inches onto a tiger-skin rug, she abandoned herself to bitter tears. Earani, her one remaining handmaiden, pressed a button behind the rack of claymores. Steel shutters slid over the windows, blocking out the sight of Lotusland.
Thirty years earlier, and thousands of miles away, a couple had discovered a girl-child roaming Mount Albert. Despite a mannish muscularity, Lucy, as they named her, was strikingly beautiful. She spoke a dozen languages, sang like a siren, and could shoot an arrow through a kiwi’s eye while riding a horse bareback. She was “destined,” Lucy informed her adoptive family, upon departing for Lotusland, to bring “Amazon ideals of love, peace, and sexual equality to a world torn by the hatred of men.”
Alas, her decision to seek renown as a TV actress had not proven wise: celebrity is more difficult to navigate than the Clashing Rocks! Lucy’s efforts to model Amazonian practices — for example, by baring one mazos as she sang her adopted country’s national anthem at a professional sporting event — were misunderstood, even ridiculed.
“Forty-two years old this March!” sobbed the Lawless One. “And the best I can do is a cameo in Bitch Slap?”
— by JOSHUA GLENN (Boston, Mass.)
A version of this story was used to encourage entries into our first micro-fiction contest. The story was published under an anagrammatical pseudonym.
CONTEST-WINNING STORIES: 1st contest | 2d contest | 3d contest | 4th contest
FINALISTS: 1st contest | 2d contest | 3d contest | 4th contest
MORE FICTION of all kinds on HiLobrow.com.
READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE
Joshua Glenn’s books include UNBORED: THE ESSENTIAL FIELD GUIDE TO SERIOUS FUN (with Elizabeth Foy Larsen); and SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: 100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS (with Rob Walker).
don’t forget she was also on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” They don’t just let anyone on that show…
hello?
And “Flight of the Conchords.”
and she was in Battlestar Galactica