ON THE WINGS OF A COCKROACH

        With solemn deliberation, Jozanna slow-blinked thrice. Instantly, she was back in her body, back in her breasts. Human female, teenage, blonde, nubile, hair down to her waist, tongue wet as peaches, eyes bright as -
        "What are my eyes bright as?" she said.
        But she couldn't think of anything. Semantic gridlock. Entropy. Mental heat-death. Was her poetic impulse dead, gone, vanished? Had her talent, her promise, her career, evaporated just like that? If so, she still had a body, hair, breasts, eyes bright as te-dum-te-dum, thighs livid as te-dumpty-dum. (But could thighs be livid? Well, if fire could flare in yelping giraffes - and that was Classical - then surely thighs could be livid.)
        "Livid as icecream," chanted Jozanna, aping bardic frenzy. "Bright as peacocks, hot as lightbulbs."
        Body, then. And eyes, eyes bright as ... well, bright eyes. Bright as carrots. Bright as an eviscerated gall bladder washed by the dews of glorious morn. And thighs something-something. Smelling of daisies. And hormones. And private strategies of meiosis. Irresistible lusts.
        "Oh, do me, do me!" she moaned, romancing her hairbrush.
        Which remained impervious to her charms.
        As was Malargan, Malargan never would, never would have her, he was too busy having it off with that slut Ezabel. And as for Oloshi, well -
        "I'd sooner drink saliva."
        And Gregor? Well, if Gregor even touched her then she would scream so loudly that icecream would splinter, so loudly that, well, that -
        "That icecream will splinter," said Jozanna decisively, reminding herself of Taft's favorite dictum, which was that a cliche is better than nothing.
        "Time is," said her clock. "Time was. Time will be. You're late, Jozanna."
        "Thanks for nothing," said Jozanna Yu.
        And pressed the button which clothed her in carnival, discarded the pig - she had twice been formally reprimanded for bringing animals to lectures - and then ran, ran, ran, ran, ran, all the way to the lecture theater.
        The lecture theater. Description. (Pay attention!) Auditorium. Canted steeply, the lecturer's rostrum deepest down the gravity well. Rows of padded bench seats set behind corresponding rows of bench desks. Two sets of stairs cleaving down through the tiers of bench seats, running from the uphill entrance doors to the downhill rostrum.
        And Jozanna Yu -
        Sprinting along with her bells rattling, her streamers flying, her rainbows in full fluctuation, Jozanna Yu came snorting into the lecture theater. She scanned the steeply raked auditorium, looking for her tormenter. And there he was - Gregor! Sitting in his accustomed place. A quiet, studious boy with big ears, bent over his portable computer. All innocence, if outward appearances were anything to go by. Fair face, blue eyes, freckles. Too cute to be naughty.
        But Jozanna was not fooled. Jozanna did not hesitate. Storming down the stairs, she homed in on her target. She grabbed him by the hair, hauled him off the bench then gave him a heaving push. Helpless to save himself, Gregor went hurtling downward toward the stage. Where he promptly shattered into little lumps of sugar, as she had known he would. As a school kid, Gregor had been bullied dreadfully, so he had programmed a self-destruct into his Hax persona.
        "Co-locations," said Taft, his commencement simultaneous with his materialization.
        As a professor, Taft did not have to walk from place to place. He could just materialize, and did so, though it was very bad manners, and all the books of etiquette advised against it. He was already there, and he was already swinging into his lecture.
        The subject: Modes. The teacher: Taft Ilichanjer. The place: the virtual campus of Lan-Lan Banzo, the leading university of Lopolith Mo. The students: Jozanna Yu and her fellows, budding poets one and all, destined for suitably creative affairs in advertising, sales and public relations, or for think-tank jobs with the Universal Language Project.
        "Think contrasts," said Taft, never one to waste words. "Imagine a bathtub."
        He snapped his fingers, causing a bathtub to manifest itself on the rostrum, so nobody had to do any imagining whatsoever. Jozanna felt insulted. What is this, Taft? What's your problem? Do you think we're a bunch of engineers or something? We're poets! Lords of the imagination! Leave the literal stuff for the atom-punchers!
        "Now," said Taft, walking backwards and forwards across the stage, sugar lumps crunching under his shoes as he did so. "You come into your bathroom, and you find in your bath an orange."
        Snap.
        An orange.
        "Or a horse's head."
        Snap.
        And there it was, liquid-eyed and gory. A horse's head. Minus the horse. Tacky!
        "Or a watermelon."
        Snap.
        Donna, Zinifer and Ercy seated themselves on Jozanna's bench seat, Donna squeezing past to flank her. Taft was still doing it. Statement. Manifestation. Statement. Manifestation. Come on, Taft! We're not kids! We don't need the magic show! Jozanna exchanged glances with Donna, who rolled her eyes theatrically. By now the bathtub was crammed full, blooming, burgeoning, overspilling: oranges, melons, crocodiles, strings of sausages, broken chainsaws, the wreckage of a splintered hour glass, a lump of driftwood and five quarts of shaving cream. Cornucopia time.
        "Co-locations," said Taft proudly, gesturing at his bathtub.
        Really! What did he think this was? The fine arts faculty or something? If we were stuck in the fecal dabbling mode, we'd all have signed up as artists, you could teach us dribble-and-spit, we'd love you, we'd vote you into heaven. You'd be a god for real, rather than just faking it.
        "Co-locations," said Taft, delivering himself of the wisdom of the ages, "are central to linguistic implementations in the poetic mode."
        Linguistic implementations in the poetic mode? He meant: poetry. But he would rather have paid good money than say so. Taft was a complexity man, and Taft -
        Taft was not Jozanna's favorite professor. She far preferred Zilo Angelicus, who taught Verbal Alacrity. Or even Utamaro, with his drier-than-the-dust-of-mung-beans-a-billion-years-old course on Classical Tropes.
        "But!" said Taft, clapping his hands melodramatically, and so vanishing the bathtub, "how do we find our co-locations in the first place?"
        In history, he suggested. In building science, in pulp and paper technology and biological engineering. In puppetry and art history. In mathematics and conchoidal music. In the morgue and the rubbish dump. And (supremely!) in sports. (Taft was known to be a keen fan of the worse essence-of-pulp slam-bang bash-and-kill combat sports).
        "Subtext," wrote Donna, scribbling on raw paper. "I'm old enough to know this stuff, you're just tadpoles."
        "Nothing is easier to fake than erudition," wrote back Jozanna.
        As Taft proceeded to co-locate bean sprouts and a mouthguard, a toothbrush and a skull, a klaviklodion and a tiesta, a delbus and a Classical thwarf, a sea urchin and a runcible spoon, Jozanna Yu sat with her friends in a coven increasingly active, scribbling, commenting, second-guessing, anticipating, and extravagantly (hilariously!) analyzing the sexuality of every head in view.
        Until -
        The lecture was done, and Donna was gone, and Zinifer was rushing off to her recital, and Ercy was despatching herself to her flagellation module, and Jozanna gratefully escaped back to her room, where she found a pig unaccountably squatting on her bed.
        "And what do you think you're doing?" said Jozanna, wondering if this was another one of Gregor's tricks.
        The pig snoinked at her in a companionable manner. It looked very comfortable, snugged up on her patchwork quilt, a quilt modeled on the one her mother had tenderly by flesh-and-blood hand-and-finger labor sewed over the course of three long years -
        "A pig," said Jozanna. "You're a co-location, aren't you? Part of, I mean. Pig co-located. With, uh. All these things. Is this a test, Professor Taft?"
        No response.
        If Taft was watching (he would have needed a Privacy Waiver, but it would have been well within his capacity to get one) then he chose to make no response.
        Then Jozanna remembered. She had dressed herself in carnival, and the pig was part of her carnival outfit. Not a test at all. Just a vagrancy, a fugitive occurrence, just one of those things that happened, just one more aspect of that indifferent reality which formulated itself (significant, banal, oozing, concatenating, bursting, coruscating) with supreme disregard for the dictates of art.
         "You, you," said Jozanna Yu, pointing at the pig. "Vanish! Vanish!"
        With a glint of musical static, the pig promptly envanished itself, leaving the air lightly burnished with the slightest trace of aftermath iridescence, which was coupled with a brief smell of mint.
        "The copulation of verbs," said Jozanna, apropos of nothing. Then, to her hairbrush, reproachfully: "And where were you when I needed you? Don't you care for me?"
        Since the hairbrush made no response, in vengeance she reduced it to the status of mere tool, and sat on her bed brushing her long blonde hair.
        "Time waits for no man," said her clock.
        "I'm a woman," said Jozanna.
        "No you're not. You're a girl."
        "I," said Jozanna portentously, "have spun with blood on the beaches of the dawn. I have swum in the seas of a thousand suns. I have slept with the sunset. I have suffered the raw god in the bull, the heart of the beating swan. My nipples are radios, there is a tractor in my head, I have been sorted by shellfish and chastised by sesame seeds. How can I possibly be a girl?"
        "Be what you like," said her clock. "But your next poem is due this morning, overdue in fact, and they're not granting extensions, right?"
        "Oh," said Jozanna.
        And sat down at her desk, promptly, and reached for her quill pen, her parchment, her ink grinder. She ran her eye over her dictionaries, her concordances, her technical manual bound in the approved Classical sharkskin. Then she reproved herself sternly: there was no time for all that! She would just have to wing it.
        But how?
        "Fool!" said Jozanna sternly. "Look in your heart, and write!"