It Looked Different on the Model Read Online Free Page B

sleeping, so if a Twinkie or Devil Dog had to die every now and then at the hands of a teeth-gnashing night-eater, I was cool with that. If a new pair of shoes popped up on my front porch every now and then, that was a thrill, and, I’m sorry, but I don’t see how I lose in this game.
    From what I can piece together, the de-evolution of myself to Ambien Laurie is fairly swift, and the entire transformation takes place within a single second. According to my husband, who has in fact seen her materialize, when Ambien Laurie takescharge, I become a very calm yet highly aggressive person, like a gunfighter, who looks at him with an expression that relays calmly, “Sure, go ahead and eff with me. I’ll eat your face off. I’m cool, either way. You make the call.”
    To me, however, it goes almost unnoticed until the next day, when I might see what I believe is a shard of wood on the bathroom floor and panic, thinking we might have termites, until I pick it up, realize it is a pretzel, and my mind quickly flashes to Ambien Laurie sitting on the potty and shoving pretzels into her gullet like popcorn at 3:00 A.M . Or when walk into my office and see a cheese cracker sandwich delicately balanced on the corner of the hall table, and I have an immediate flashback of walking into the living room in the middle of the night, rooting through my purse like a truffle pig. I’m eating the twin of the cracker, instead of throwing them away because they were in my purse for the better part of a solstice, although Ambien Laurie filed that nugget of information away for later retrieval, when it was her feeding time. Or when I’m getting my morning coffee and the box of Triscuits is open and sitting on the counter, and I remember that I was standing there at three in the morning, looking at the Triscuit and then at an Oreo and thinking: I’ll eat
this
now while I’m waiting to eat
that
cookie.
    Ambien Laurie is also scientifically inclined, as evidenced by the memory of her responding to a dream in which my living-room wall was entirely covered, floor to ceiling, by a chart, much like the periodic table of elements. In each little box, however, was not a letter abbreviation but a number and a delightful drawing of what appeared to be distinct and different mushroom clouds, swirlies, and scrolls. In the dream, I was in awe of the complexity of the chart and all of the elaborate illustrations when my eyes finally reached the top and it all became clear: It was The Fart Chart (see this page ), and everytype of fart, categorized by its ferocity, attributes, bubbles, and bursts, was depicted in a very artistic rendering with a corresponding identification number.
    Still swimming in the dream as she stumbled to the bathroom through the dark hallway, Ambien Laurie sat on her throne and thought to herself, Ahhh, number 248 is a good one. I should really do that one more often.
    The evidence of Ambien Laurie is present not only in random crumbs around my house and bursts of nighttime brilliance but also in snippets of emails the next morning. I have woken up numerous mornings to find responses in my inbox to emails I was unaware I had sent from deep within the shadows of the previous evening, and I have to start piecing events together like it’s a crime-scene investigation. Imagine my surprise when Ambien Laurie wove a tale about Mr. Grunt, a sixty-five-year-old phys ed teacher who was covered in graying marsupial fur and kept his hamburgers warm underneath his floppy man boobs. Yeah. I already know. If you think it was horrible reading that, imagine the horror of discovering you not only
wrote
it but
sent
it to people, and I mean people as in plural. Picture that the thought of Mr. Grunt actually emerged from your unconscious and that your self-edit button was not only deactivated but completely disconnected by a ravenous eater of purse trash, who then realized there was no one in the air-traffic-controller tower, thus allowing random and