Fictionlet
“Oh dear,” said Greg.
“Oh dear?” said Brigid, pausing over her slice of pizza.
“Yes, ‘oh dear.’ I said ‘oh dear’ and I stand by it. If you like, I could add ‘oh bother’ in deference to your fondness for Winnie the Pooh.”
“What’s oh bothering you?”
“That girl’s sacral dimples,” said Greg, nodding towards a cluster of teenagers near the cash register.
Brigid blinked. “Her Sacramento?”
“Sacral dimples,” Greg repeated.
Feeling she probably didn’t really want to know, Brigid said, “What’s a sacral dimple?”
“Oh, you know, those two indentations near the base of your spine, so lovingly detailed by sculptors. Where your back muscles connect with your sacrum. As in sacroiliac.”
“Oh!” said Brigid, comprehending. The cluster of teenagers, Brigid now noted, was characterized by very low-riding pants and skirts, the fashion of the day, and short, midsection-revealing tops among the girls. One of the girls happened to be facing away from Brigid and Greg’s table, and her sacral dimples were indeed striking. Her skirt was also extremely short. “Those!” she said. “What about them?”
“Well,” Greg said, as if confused by the question, “just that they’re there, I guess. This low-cut fad has got to go. I don’t want to have squadrons of teenage girls flashing their sacral dimples at me 24/7!”
Brigid chuckled. “What is this, a reprise of the ‘boobs’ conversation?”
“Don’t start on me, smarty-panties,” he retorted. “Speaking of which, I wonder how she managed to fit underwear under that narrow strip of cloth. Or even if she did at all.”
Brigid shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Honestly, you’re such a prude.”
“I am not!” Greg snapped back. “I am definitely and decidedly a very not-prude, and it’s pure ignorance that makes you say that I am! Just because I prefer girls, no matter how attractive they may or may not be, to pull their skirts up to a proper length, does not a prude make. I am an aesthete. The viewing of a person’s sacral dimples, or indeed any other of the major erogenous zones, should be a moment of exquisite intimacy, achieved after a great deal of wooing and preferably an expensive dinner or even better a series of expensive dinners. It cheapens and demeans both this girl and me that I know sundry details about the layout of her anatomy, without so much as knowing her name.”
“All right, all right,” said Brigid, holding up her fork as if to defend herself from a charging rhino. “Don’t freak out, jeepers!”
“Harumph,” said Greg.
“For what it’s worth,” she added, “I pretty much agree with you. I’d be half-tempted to go over there and forcibly pull the skirt up myself, but the girl’s skirt is so short that pulling it up wouldn’t help … particularly if she didn’t manage to fit underwear under it. Yoink! That’d get people’s attention!”
Greg’s eyebrows shot ceilingwards at the idea. “Good lord!” he said. “She’d go from unpleasant to illegal in one swift move!”
-The Gneech
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