f

F The temperature inside her fenestrated crown is so much higher than that of the surrounding atmosphere that the crown's windows are perpetually frosted over, as if her thoughts are always blushing. On her sixteenth birthday, when she awoke to find her mother bending over her with a Rubbermaid spatula, gently scraping the frost from the glass, she was so enraged that she jumped up from bed and walked right out the front door barefoot in her Laura Ashley nightgown, never to return. The second violation of her crown occurred at the age of 34 when she was still under anesthesia after an emergency appendectomy. Upon waking, she sensed immediately that someone had disturbed her beautiful frost; looking into a hand mirror, she beheld etched upon her crown's windowpanes a garden of snapdragons, harebells, and Sweet William, complete with a honeybee half-drinking, half-drowning in a dew-filled blossom. Was it a nurse that had done this? An aide? Was it a conspiracy that the entire surgical team had participated in like a gang rape while she lay there helpless on the operating table? She sued the hospital (a precedent-setting case in which she represented herself) and won twenty-seven million dollars. Thus, we admire but do not necessarily like her.

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