This Year's Exhibition

Barley was a beautiful middle-aged woman with hard Hs all over her face who could barely get the horses to stop trying to eat her. She presented the exhibit after the horses had been drugged with a derivative of a flower that only grows in a three foot square plot of the Amazon. It blooms but one night a year. The drug synthesized from this flower had a value of one million dollars per dose, but it was worth it to get the horses off her, Barley reasoned.

She presented the exhibit well, but this exhibit was not nearly as impressive as the one from last year (hardly any mutilates, only one amputee) so all the Einstein-haired scientists scowled. This should have been their big day. Instead, it ended for many of them in the same manner as sex. They left weeping and clutching at their wild, white hair. Barley wished the exhibit would have been better, and bit her nails, and fixed her hair, even though all the scientists had left and even though none of the scientists were even remotely attractive men, nor did the scientists have time for sexual relationships, not with this year's dearth of brilliant new specimens.

"I wish I would have chosen a different career path," Barley said to one of the specimens in the exhibit. It nodded politely and requested to be released from its cage, as usual. As usual, Barely ignored the response and pushed the button that supplied electrical current to the grid beneath the specimen's feet. The specimen screamed and jumped monkey-like around the cage. Barley barely heard the cries. The other specimens cowered and whimpered in a very pathetic fashion. "I wish I would never have become a presenter of perverse mad science experiments."

She was serious. When the horses woke up they ate her.

Copyright 2010 G. Arthur Brown