(0-18 inches) of love-making and intimate contact

It is the year 2080. Recently widowed metachryolithiumide crystal miner’s daughter Augustine Snell is meditating on the meaninglessness of her life. Three days earlier her five-person polyandrous marriage had come to an untimely end when her husbands challenged a set of In Vitro spawned Bolivian quadruplets to a lightsaber duel over Mexico’s impending secession from Yum! Brands Inc., parent company of Taco Bell®. Gruesomely, but predictably, they lost, serving as a reminder to chivalrous men everywhere that it is always unwise to challenge dudes in brimmed hats and brightly colored ponchos to fencing matches. With visions of dismembered extremities dancing in her head, Augustine meanders down a nondescript street in a nondescript city in the Midwest, peering bitterly at her townsmen through translucent plexiglass windows as she passes. Then, something catches her eye. Dancing. Not the macabre dance of imagined arms and legs rent from body by a stream of concentrated electromagnetic radiation, no, no! But the joyous dancing of the ballerinas of Dance Studio The. Four fine femmes frolick freely on the floor. They are, Augustine notices as the melodious quartet of tutus flounces by, identical to one another. Sisters, no doubt. Multiples, no doubt: one of many well-coordinated clutches conceived with the help of that God of Man, modern science. Eight in ten, reflects the woman, momentarily transported back to a childhood of singular loneliness in a sea of prepubescent faces.² The fourfold countenances of all of the sets of quads she has ever known flash before her eyes, and with every repetitive freckle, with every copied cornea, with every duplicate double-chin, her anguish increases, until finally, fixed in her mind, she finds four familiar, swarthy mustachioed South American faces. With a heavy heart and a cry of hate and rage that sounds a little like Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried singing a karaoke duet under an air raid siren, Augustine pirouettes ironically into the Studio, calling to her breast, as a martyr calling upon a pantheon of patron saints, the courage of every naturally conceived revolutionary woman who has come before her: …Boudicca…Joan of Arc…Margaret Thatcher…Rosa Parks…Lady GaGa… With a flourish, she draws one of the very lightsabers used to execute her husband(s) from a fashionable cloak of gold lamé, and does the unthinkable.

Only one of the quatre suffered fatal injuries that night. (The one on the far left. No, your other left.) As for the others? Their pliés would never be pliant again.