In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

Shit, Ula, I'm not twelve, and you're not my mother, or even my sicko
dikey aunt, got that?"
Ula ignored this and poured her a full tumbler, no ice. Penny
gulped down half of it and gagged.
"Where are the paintings?" she wheezed, adjusting to the rush
of toxic numbness. Sandro moved away from them towards the
window, clinking his cubes.
"At the studio, a lot of stuff is there. You know, Dick's going
into design for a bit, so the studio is a store house now. I'm thinking
dance studio, it would be ideal, if the floors were overhauled." She
made one of those pinched gallic faces. "But New York is such a
fabulous idea! I am so o sick of it here!" she wailed.
"Oh fa-abulous!" Penny mocked Ula.
Sandro watched them sideways from the window. Ula skidded
around the space in her funny socks, unphased.
"Paris is a museum. Musée Euro Disney. That's why I moved to
New York in the first place. 'Where it's at, man! New York, New York!'
She did a Broadway flourish then doubled up in a monster coughing fit.
Dick minced in, his nose in the air. "Sandro! You're right on
time as always. Hello Penny, well, look at those blazing cherry cheeks.
Hope you're hungry, we have rotisserie chicken and a salad, nothing
fancy, Inez is not feeling quite herself these days, pas dans son assiettte,
so the assiettes are mine. My assiettes are there for you! Hangh, hangh,
hangh. Shall we?" He led them into the dining room.
In the center was a translucent yellow resin salad bowl filed
with clumps of greenish yellow lettuce. Matching resin plates were
placed on the bare wood with skinny forks that looked cool but
couldn't pick up anything because the prongs were stunted and the
blobby knives had cylindrical handles that rolled around when you tried
to cut something, and lavender linen napkins were twisted into stringy
yellow resin Mobius strips that were almost impossible to remove.
White narcissi were placed in vases between each setting. Behind the
salad, the scrawny French chicken slept in its oval yellow crib on a bed
of inedible curly purple cabbage. Dick made a show of carving the bird
and offering the pieces. He took half a breast himself and gave Sandro
the other half, plus the two wings,
"Because, you're a growing boy."
Penny, who actually was still growing, got the stringy
drumsticks.
She shoveled in the salad as best as she could but picked up the
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