might fall prey but never with two of them; and she was tiers beyond the ordinary. Self-declared as a female who was not a woman, Gabriele was a hard block of ice to thaw. Even an exceptional Adonis with a coruscating and speciously ingenuous smile did not have a chance with her. Only such an Adonis as Michael, with a familiar and sweet son whom she had already thought of fondly, had the potential to do the worst damage to her pristine Antarctic surface; but such happenings were rare indeed. The two strangers instantly made her circumspect and guarded by accosting her with their sexual innuendos, which she did not even have to understand in words. The nuances were rife like the sounds of locusts in the unfolding and draping blanket of night. They were there to be extrapolated in the intensity of lust-filled, hungry-hound looks and the flippant glances and general levity of the two males toward each other. And she knew that, as adept as she might be at defending herself with a bit of judo and karate, that she could never ward off an army of rapists. That being the case, she backed away to belong only to the day. By day she was enamored by all of the mom-and-pop shops cobbled together from wood and tin and the activity that was bustling around them including the orange cockroach tricycle motor taxis a bit like Thailand's tuc tucs. She wanted to sink into the skin of those whom she encountered and to know of their lives intimately. The thought even occurred to her that she should get her boy from the provincial rednecks of Kansas and transform him with exposure to the world; and she would have done just that had there not been such a cloying and bitter after- taste to all this enlightenment amassing itself within her. It was a sickeningly aggrandizing clump that was exacerbating itself within her stomach; and it made her doubt the efficacy of the plan. It was getting so large that she, who grazed on the weeds and fodder of stark reality like a wild mare, was finding what she saw and her ruminations of it virtually unbearable.