Standing in the doorway of her tent, Angelina Jolie tasted the sweet desert air. The Namibian landscape was breathtakingly beautiful, now that all the unsightly people had been removed. Her tongue flickered delicately from her mouth, unsoiled now by the rank flavour of the humans, and contentedly she licked the morning dew off the sunken bridge of her nose.
The spawning had taken longer than she’d anticipated and she was hungry now. She clapped her hands once and a man appeared, with golden hair and a jawbone apparently grafted on to his face after being forcibly removed from an ox. He bowed, as she had trained him (the scars from the genital palpitator were healing nicely), and offered her a tray of grapes. She smiled, her prehensile lips peeling back like two burst sausages to reveal her blinding masticators.
‘Your tasty treats, my love,” said the man, his eyes fixed on the sand at her feet.
‘Bradley Pitt from Springfield, Missouri,” she cooed. ‘You are a good human. Lift them higher, for my forearms are exhausted from the spawning.” He obliged and she ate, draining the sweet juice with the extrusion needle in the back of her throat before revelling in the sensation of the pulp slipping down towards her first stomach.
‘We must speak about a name for the child,” said Bradley Pitt from Springfield, Missouri, tentatively making eye-contact. ‘How about Lemon Curd? Everyone in the industry is doing a sort of citrus thing. Otherwise I was thinking we could go with Plumpkin. Or —”
The words shattered in his glottis and he slumped to the sand as her heel crashed into his throat. In an instant she was on him, brandishing the genital palpitator.
‘What have we learned about expressing opinions?” she cried. ‘Is Bradley Pitt from Springfield, Missouri, a good human or is it time that he was reacquainted with testicular percolation?” The man lay very still, looking at a point on the horizon, and whispered, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again. She calmed, the white films withdrawing from her eyes and at last she smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘A good man. A precious man.”
She rose and stalked into the tent. ‘I have devised a name for the girl.” She looked at the baby, doing joyful somersaults in the large glass postnatal reservoir that bubbled in the corner. The little one saw its mother and waved a cheery fin. ‘She shall be named Shiloh.”
Bradley Pitt from Springfield, Missouri, nodded reverentially. ‘I can dig it. A holy name. A biblical place of peace. It’s spiritual. Like Las Vegas.”
‘So they say. I do not know your religious texts.” The baby was becoming facetious, writing rude words in the algae on the wall of its aquarium, and she disciplined it with a sharp jolt from the nursery electro-punisher. Stunned, it floated belly-up for a moment before coming to and apologising telepathically.
‘No,” she continued. ‘I was thinking of — oh, what is that quaint term you use? The ‘Civil’ War? Oh Shiloh, my Shiloh — 19 000 killed or wounded in 48 hours. Brother mutilating brother. Father eviscerating son.” She smiled, lost in reveries. ‘Two of the most beautiful days of my life, those fleeting moments in the spring of 1862. It was there I first fell in love, right under the blossoming trees in Fraley field, with the bullets black and humming over us like a swarm of happy honeybees. His name was Hackensack and he was a private from Jersey. He lost his torso late on the second day, but I kept his head. He was such a great kisser.”
She paused, suddenly drawn into the present. ‘I must tell the doctor that we have settled on a name!” She found Dr Eschel Rhoodie where she had left him, in his exoskeleton under the bed and switched him on. ‘Doctor! We’re going with Shiloh!”
‘Wonderful, dearest girl!” he croaked. ‘You know, I’ve worked with a lot of freaks in my time, but you are by the far the prettiest and cleverest.”
That’s why she had employed the old South African, back in 1993, the same year he had ‘died”. He always knew just what to say and when to say it. Publicists were truly a special breed.
‘We’ll deny you’ve spawned,” Rhoodie was saying, ‘and then leak a blurry picture to al-Jazeera. They’ll climb all over the Hebrew name — call it a Zionist baby and that will get you major coverage in all the East Coast broadsheets. Then we sue Time Warner, pre-emptively, for violating your right to an apolitical birth and if they counter-sue, we’ll —”
But Bradley Pitt from Springfield, Missouri, had spilled coffee on her linen and she was lunging for the palpitator —