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On a Tuesday morning in the country town of Wellsburn, New Zealand, an unusual event occurred.
Maddy Fesse, a 38 year old single woman, woke up as normal, hopped out of bed and hurried to the shower. Running late for work, she dried herself quickly and went to put on her knickers.
"This doesn't feel right. No diet works that fast."
Turning her back to the steamed-up mirror over the bathroom cabinet, she twisted her head around, took a look, and then ran to the full-length mirror on the wardrobe in her bedroom, turning side on, then back-on, looking over her shoulder.
"My bum's missing!"
In its place was a flat piece of skin, still damp from the shower, glistening under the ceiling light.
At that moment, there came a loud knocking at the front door, which alarmed her, as it was not quite seven o'clock. She put on her knickers, stuffed them with a pillow, threw on her dressing gown and went to the door.
It was her neighbour Willie Streaker, a little man with a sharp face and a big moustache. He looked uncannily like a mouse peering over the edge of a toothbrush and was reputed to be the local peeping tom.
"I found this object floating bottom-up in the goldfish pond when I collected my newspaper this morning." Willie opened the supermarket bag he was holding to reveal a bum. "It looks like yours, with that birth mark," he said pointing to a shape resembling a bugle on its right cheek.
Maddy moved menacingly towards him. He stepped back, dropping the bag, spilling its contents.
She watched in horror as the bum ran down the garden path, leaped the gate and was gone.
Later that morning, when Maddy got off the bus near the accountancy office where she worked, another extraordinary thing happened.
A car drew up beside her on the footpath and out stepped a bishop. Maddy saw at once that it was her bum in disguise. It went into Brown's Pharmacy and came out three minutes later holding a small paper bag, and stood looking down the street, as if watching for a taxi.
Maddy went up to it and coughed discreetly, but the bum paid her no attention.
"Your Eminence," said Maddy at last, tugging the embroidered sleeve of its crimson cassock.
"What do you want?" The bum turned to her, revealing the bugle birthmark on its right cheek.
"It is strange, so strange, but….."she began, and was about to say You are my bum and you belong to me when it struck her how odd these words might sound, if spoken aloud.
"Yes, Mademoiselle?" the bum enquired, raising its one eyebrow.
"You…are…my…bum, Sir," Maddy whispered.
"Perfectly ridiculous," the bum retorted, stomping its feet. "I've never even met you before."
It scurried away with Maddy in pursuit.
"Your bum has come off, you say?" Dr Smith-Smythe said, gruffly. He was a proctologist, a specialist in the medical field that seems to attract doctors with outsized knuckles. "Better let me take a look."
Maddy took off her knickers, removed the pillow, and bent over.
"Hmmmm. Your buttocks do seem to have vanished," the doctor said. "Can you still pass wind?"
Maddy obliged.
"That'll do," snapped the doctor, taking a long pole with a hook on the end and reaching up with it to open the high fanlight window. "Please get up on the couch. We'll soon see what's behind this." He put on a pair of gloves.
"Luckily, there appears to be no functional damage," he pronounced, after a brief examination. "We could attempt to reattach your bum surgically, if you've still got it somewhere, but the result could be a..." He paused, struggling to keep a straight face, then continued..."a disaster."
Constable Lardington was seated at a green formica desk eating a mince pie. He looked up as Maddy walked in.
"I want to report a missing bum."
"Where did you last see it?"
"Running along Main Street dressed up as a Bishop."
"Did you attempt to apprehend it?"
"I ran after it but by the time I got up to it, it had gone."
"Well, Lady, if you can produce a photo of your bum, I'll have a missing poster prepared and displayed around the town."
The only photo that Maddy had was a blurred photocopy taken at the office Christmas party.
"No photos," she replied.
"Can you describe it?
"My boyfriend Jake said it was really sweet, like I'd been sitting in a pile of sugar."
The constable wrote this down.
"And it had a birthmark shaped like a bugle."
'Is that with one "g" or two?"
"Yes."
The constable cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, Lady, but regulations state we must have a photo. You really don't have one?"
"No," she replied. "I suspect my neighbour has a few but I'm not asking him. Creep!"
"Sorry, we can't help you, then," said the constable.
The receptionist at the radio station had blue eyes, blue hair and supersonic fingers. Several minutes passed before she noticed Maddy standing in front of her, finished texting and looked up.
"Gud mrning, + hw may we hlp U 2day @ Goldn Hits 45.9FM?" she said, rather oddly.
"I want to put a "lost" notice on the Community Bulletin Board," replied Maddy.
She handed it to the receptionist, who shrieked with laughter. After some minutes, the girl calmed down and said, this time in the Queen's English, "I'm sorry, Madam, but the Broadcasting Standards Authority would be very cross if we broadcast this."
Maddy sped from the room. The girl on reception resumed texting, with a look on her face like someone who can't wait to tell her friends.
The news spread. Rumours abounded. One said the bum could be seen entering the court house at two minutes to ten every morning, wearing a dark suit and a Mickey Mouse tie, like a lawyer. Crowds assembled on the footpath some hours before the time of the bum's expected appearance. People jostled for the best viewing positions and fights broke out.
On another occasion, it was rumoured the bum had been spotted dressed in blue overalls like a mechanic, and an unruly mob besieged the local engineering workshop until one of the welders, a Vietnam veteran decorated for his prowess with flame throwers, chased them off with a blow torch.
In deference to this journal's readership of high functioning professionals, I should provide some information relating to Maddy's background and character.
She was born at an early age to male and female parents. Her father, a typical New Zealander, played an unimportant role in Maddy's development while her mother was overly important, in the usual manner.
In short, Maddy's upbringing was normal, showing no sign of childhood psychodynamic dysfunction, providing no theoretical grounds on which to regard Maddy's case of bum loss as suggestive of underlying psychosomatic or psychotic symptomatology.
For the benefit of non-professional readers, Maddy wasn't nuts.
An American psychoanalyst visiting the New Zealand did postulate that Maddy was suffering from Normotic Personality Disorder, a condition in which a patient is excessively normal, more normal than normal, and driven by a compulsive striving to achieve even greater normality. He based his hypothesis on Maddy's probable close identification with her mother, who, he asserted, would doubtless have been obsessed with faulty cognitions about the size of her bum "as are all New Zealand women."
In the opinion of the present writer, the psychoanalyst was an idiot, who failed to establish a satisfactory causative link between Normotic Personality Disorder and bum loss. He was also a sexist pig.
The females of Wellsburn were initially divided in their responses to Maddy's reported bumlessness, reacting with scepticism, hostility, jealousy or envy.
Maddy was invited to speak at an extraordinary meeting of the Wellsburn Country Womens' Institute. She spoke movingly, then stripped off from the waist down and twirled about.
Exclamations of wonderment filled the hall. The vicar's wife declared a miracle and the Mayoress pronounced Maddy a saint.
Maddy called for silence, leapt onto the supper table, and with hands stretched towards the audience, like a prophet of old, she proclaimed "You, too, can be bumless! Just believe in miracles! Believe!"
*
Such is my account of the unusual occurrences that occurred in one of our Southern provinces, leading to the well-documented epidemic of bumlessness which spread though the entire South Island of New Zealand, eventually affecting 98.3% of post-pubertal females.
The account, admittedly, does raise many questions. How was it that a bum, detached from its owner, was found floating in the goldfish pond of a neighbour? How come the bum's owner, an otherwise intelligent woman, tried to advertise her loss over the radio, knowing full well that a respectable community station would be unlikely to accept such an advertisement?
And how could a writer, with over 90 publications to his credit, possessing at least a modicum of intelligence, stoop to writing such drivel?
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Tagged in Bruce Costello