Profiles of Nature 51

We know – you’re looking at that number up there and hoping, praying that this is just a year’s topic, and we can only grin evilly and think to ourselves, That’s what you get for praying…

unidentified flat fish Æðelflæd
This week we have Æðelflæd, demonstrating the power of professional makeup since she’s actually a pufferfish, moreover, one that you wouldn’t give a second glance to if you passed her on the street except to suddenly ask yourself, “What the fuck is a pufferfish doing on the streets on this side of town?” But you wouldn’t think it was a particularly sexy, smouldering pufferfish, is what we’re saying. Æðelflæd perfected her command of come-hither looks like that seen here by studying the photographs of women eating salads, as well as shoppers in the backsplash section of home improvement stores. What is it with that? She had a traumatic childhood, because every time the class was told to line up in alphabetical order, a fight ensued, though therapy helped her get past this; she still can’t utter the words, “Webster’s Unabridged,” though. She took up modeling on the advice of her school’s guidance counselor, though since she lived in a very rural, income-depressed district the counselor was just a Magic 8-Ball, but it presently has a better success rate than the majority of guidance counselors. Æðelflæd has a solid career and is happy with it, even when she has yet to use anything learned in Home Ec, but she knows her looks can’t last forever because her face will freeze that way (her parents are pretty old.) When the time comes, she plans to sabotage the career of her young upstart rival, look haughty in the court proceedings, vanish into obscurity only to reveal that she was hiking through Australia, write a few books, hold down her own spot in Hollywood Squares for five years, make a few cameos in crime dramas, start an overseas gardening business, get prosecuted for tax fraud, become a born-again Capricorn in prison, settle down on a ranch without actually owning one, and finally play her own mother in the biopic about her life. Or maybe research why field hockey is only considered a girls’ sport – it could go either way. Until then, she’s going to claim that “Æðelflæd” is pronounced a different way every six months or so just to screw with the gossipy types. She insists that her favorite fashion accessories are those little feathers on a lanyard and clip from the eighties, but we suspect that’s just to watch the eBay listings explode.

You know you’re just gonna suck it up for another week, so don’t bother feigning otherwise.

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