Love Cabbage

"Enough! Enough," he cried between blows.

She paused, lowering the umbrella. "You haven’t suffered enough, you little worm," she hissed, and grabbed another implement of destruction. He turned to run, but it was too late --- she’d castrated him. Howling with laughter like a chlorine gas hurricane, she trounced out of the house, her ubiquitous cape (the red one with the quaint yellow "S" in the center) flapping behind her.

A decade later, she saw him again, this time on the street corner. He crouched amid broken glass, peep-show fliers and syringes. He was wearing a tattered American flag over his thin shoulders and his flesh was a mesh of lacerations and bruises. She stepped forward and dropped a silver bullet into his outstretched hand. "Thank you, ma’am," he whispered, his voice a cracked and haunting growl. She couldn’t bear to answer and drove her limousine in the opposite direction.

A year after that meeting, she was sitting in her mansion, swilling pine cleaner. A century of questing extremities, a thousand probing digits, had kneaded her now-pulpy, now-forgotten features. The doorbell rang. Her servant, the President of the United States, hurried to answer it. As soon as the door was open, he rushed past her servant and into her drawing room. "I live for your meandering devices," he said, unable to control himself.

She decided then that she’d had enough, and, reaching into her bureau drawer, pulled out a five-foot-long Pink Pearl eraser and rubbed him out.