Asafoetida

The girl with the bezoar has stopped emailing me. It wasn't actually a bezoar, I've forgotten what it actually was, though I saw a picture of it, before she shyly removed it from public purview, sitting gross and innocuous on some blue surgical paper, digitally photographed in the post-op. I imagine it now with blood vessels, though it almost certainly had none, merely "fiber", whatever that happens to mean.

A bezoar proper is a lump of undigestible material, which hangs out in the stomach for longer or shorter periods of time. Sometimes people have them surgically removed. They are reputed to have magical properties, maybe because of some special significance assigned to them when prognostication was practiced more regularly with the entrails of goats and such like. They are a panacea against poisonings.

I had seen her months ago, talked to her with visceral pleasure, as though I were myself bezoared, having watched her sometimes before. She is unavailable, and we are both certain of this, at any rate we live on opposite coasts. Unfortunately she is pretty, and allowed me to touch her necklace, and we have since been playing a lazy correspondence.