I’m frozen for a moment in the dining room, gaping at Dot’s painting of Son and Leen, which has indeed been advanced with pink nail polish, among other techniques, I’m sure, and the upshot is Son and Leen are both glowing a sickly shade of bubblegum that’s freaking me, their insatiable faces seemingly leaping out at me, triggering my incipient acid paranoia. I’m sure they can send brainwaves from the canvas that will infect my thoughts.

“I know,” says G, putting a protective arm around me. “It’s creepy as all fuck. They look like raw beef marinated in Pepto-Bismol. Francis Bacon’s pope gets it on with de Kooning’s pink angels. And it seems like their ravenous maws are going to engulf us. But you gotta admit, Dot has real talent.”

“De Kooning’s pink angels?” I ask.

“Yeah, an early work in his move to abstraction. Looks like a biomorphic orgy. I think the title is ‘Pink Angels’.”

“Maybe if we kill Son in the painting, we’ll kill her in real life,” I suggest, trying to be optimistic as I’m invigorated by G’s art history chops.

“Deb, don’t get all Oscar Wilde on me. He didn’t end well. And you, I don’t you want to end, period. We’re going to the LaHand Galaxy together. Now let’s go upstairs and find the Oxys. This is Dot’s painting, we have no right to put our swords through it.”