"STOP!!!" she screamed, as he crammed yet another penguin into her already-stretched-beyond-pain left nostril (it seemed he was saving the right orifice for more sinister purposes). The air stank of the dank, sweaty cheese her father used to force her to eat, back on the farm in the middle of Los Angeles, surrounded by all sorts of wild beasts with strange yellow-bird fetishes. The kind of freaks who would smother her doorstep from dusk until dawn looking for some sort of scrap of metaphysical reassurence. "Philosophy is heroin," she would often write in her diary, speaking of her strange ability to see into some kind of forever that somehow appealed to these wastes of vinnegar and mayonaisse.

"Stupid old man," she thought to herself, as she would never dare to let such things pass through her lips. She had made that mistake one too many times in her life. It was, after all, occurrences like these that sent her through the carnal metamorphosis that somehow managed to dump her off here. In this filthy room, in this shit hotel, in this stained city, in this drowsy, crusty, drunken existence.

It was times like these in which she would sit and reflect about certain questionable aspects of her life, such as: "Why is he still here? Why haven't I left yet? Why is my house on fire? Do the penguins actually like it here? Is that a rash? It could be skin cancer...that's all I need right now. Skin cancer...honestly!"

The only thing worse than the faux meditational sense of reflection was the parched aftertaste of regret, which usually, she found, followed the former. Wasn't there any way to have one without the other? Were they as immeasurably inseperable as they were painful?

"I need a new drug," she whispered, switching off the television. "Something that doesn't taste sour. Something that doesn't make me dizzy or lazy or horny or stupid or tired or anxious or vain."

She glanced at the nearest penguin as if searching for an "OK". All she got was a pair of small, beady, piercing eyes staring unblinkingly back at her. That was clearance enough. She stood up, dusted off the remains of her codependent ex-mother, and stepped outside.

She felt a new sense of independence as she began to strut about her neighborhood. She didn't mind that nothing seemed familiar to her, that the trees all seemed to grow upside-down, that the mailman's bones were laying dormant on the walkway to her neighbor's house, that the children at play were naked and painted uncomfortably loud colors of blue and green and waving long, rusty implements of mass terror. She was going places.

No longer would she be tormented by the monster she called "home". No more would the demons of society force her to "diversify, diversify, diversify!!" For the first time in her life, she could proudly walk down with the street with her chest thrust out, chanting, "See me! See a free woman! Buy me some ice cream and I'll buy your mother a Volkswagen!"