First, in the beginning, at the outset, Venus was in furs. She crouched over her warrior as though taking a bath and he wasn't even there. But he was hard-up and strove hard to plant his seed in the womb orbiting his crotch like a cyclone kissing Illinois. As it was near the end of her cycle, the seed took; the seed strictly a manner of speaking; less knee-jerk: the nectarous pollen elbowed into her loaded pistil. The end result was the same, no matter how we speak or don't: the belly of Venus swelled inside her gleaming furs.
The warrior - feeling like a mestizo between a Martian and a pimp - drifted off the face of the prairie. He hid his blushes under an obscure southern cold front rumored to haunt the vicinity of Paris, Alabama. With the native stupidity of those who love war, he never realized he was the sex object that had been raped. Likewise, he continued to believe a seed entirely his lay planted in that sky wrapped in fertile perfume. In other words, he misnamed both his shame and his glory. The one he had backwards. The other didn't exist.
Far above meso-America, Venus disrobed and slipped into a holding pattern to await the new arrival. Like all creations of heaven and mind, the child developed after a few hours' incubation and was fullgrown at birth. A fantastic meteor shower spawned from the bowl of Aquarius in honor of the blessed event.
People all over Kansas rubbed stars out of their eyes for weeks. Nobody did a lick of work. Cases and cases of champagne were emptied from Fargo to El Paso. Love was made from the Gulf through the panhandles clear up to the Badlands. Wiping the afterbirth off her lips with a smile, Venus beamed and was well-pleased.
Meanwhile, the gleaming furs fell…
When the news reached Mars, he was in downtown Paris lubricating his jalopy. He had her up on the bedsprings out in an alley off the potholed dirt road that served as the local Champs Elysee. She was an Italian roadster. Her timing was poor, her valves flopped, her starter ground, her plugs possessed all the spark of a soggy match on the belly of a snail. But she got him around, moved his point down the line from fuckin' A to B job, as long as he kept her reasonably in tune.
He was becoming interested in boring out a piston when a newsboy sprinted up the blind alley.
Mars grabbed off a copy. Looked at it. He got motor oil on the headlines. Wiped his hands on the carburetor. Picked up the paper again. Although the headlines were no longer legible, the picture looked distressingly familiar.
It was Venus, his old flame. She was holding up a baby the size of a featherweight. He dropped a crescent wrench onto the rusty bedsprings, eyeing the caption, his jaw slackening as he read.
The kid was a brandnew asteroid. Weighed twelve million tons at birth. Mostly nickel and iron. But when Mars looked up from the caption and stared into the child's eyes, he saw an undeniable silicone resemblance to his own fierce orbs. It was his kid. He wadded up the newspaper; threw it down in disgust.
This meant war. He stalked off, leaving the half-greased little Italian number jacked-up on the springs.
He fled to Troy in Upstate New York, where his arsenal was kept. He selected a sheaf of deadly ballistic spears. He loaded up with a quiver of plutonium warheads, then took along some tomahawks, plus a few nikes for good measure. He jumped in a mammoth Cadillac convertible twelve-gun tank and roared off for the plains. Rage purpled his face, blood thirst fired his worldview. In every way possible, he wanted to kill everyone involved.
She had stolen his kid. He would blast her womb to plasma, then butcher the baby. The media had polluted the brat. The kid wasn't any good anymore. No better than its prevaricating, menstruating, milkmaking mother. He was going to annihilate both mom and son before they had a chance to copulate and get more monsters.
Like all wars, at heart, it would be a Holy War.
They squared off somewhere in the desert between Thor and Jupiter, Oklahoma. Venus took a seat overhead, the better to observe the encounter. Her son, the chunky little asteroid Eros, girded his belt, took out his bow a single iridium arrow. Apart from that, he stood naked as the day he was born, which was yesterday.
The warrior soon had the boy in his prismatic gunsight. He opened a hatch and poked his irate head out.
