Kimberly Grace, having sucked her belly button deep into the unmapped vortex of her solar plexus, zipped up her blue gray jeans and tried to sit. 

That’s when she decided she could not afford another pair.

Not that Kimberly was poor, in the monetary sense.  Her good job at a well oiled girl’s school down the street from her steely condo had scored her the sapphire BMW with topaz seats she rode around in. Her bank account was flush as her thighs.

Kimberly hooked her jeans to the back wall of her walk in closet, with a solitary vow.  ‘Next time I pull these out, they will slide on like velvet foals in the new dawn and I, the Queen of Sheba, shall reclaim whatsoever throne I deign to sit upon.’

So it was that a new convert to the Society of Slender Sisters was born.  Kimberly fixed her gaze on the burgeoning sign of her ‘success,’ reached for the moleskin pad to guide her dangerous thought, and wrote one line.

'Kimberly slimberly 1-2-3.'

Effortless as black ink on the blank slate, Kimberly’s mantra girded her loins in bold rebuke of the vast culinary industrial complex of her day.  With corporate profit looming large, the woman willed her mind to reunite with the 123 pounds she’d left behind one spring day when jamoca almond fudge beguiled her with a cruel flash in the rear view mirror.  Ever since her fall, Kimberly had bowed to the smarmy jowls of high fructose corn syrup lacing the nation’s foodstuffs.

But that time was past.  Kimberly unplugged her TV, cancelled her hook-ups to print and web; she floated free.  Wading through traffic in her BMW, she switched off cajoling come ons by suave eatery adsters.

‘Kimberly slimberly 1-2-3,’ she chanted, Dairy Queens and Burger Kings dispersing in the mist.

Her quest was not for her alone, it was for truth incarnate - the carnate would be Kimberslim, the butterfly intended.  Every supermarket isle became a wheel rutted street in the wild wild west.  And Kimberly Grace was up for the showdown.  Nothing got past her eagle eyes and hair trigger reflex.  Staring down the Sara Lee, she made her way to mounds of fresh arugula and golden snow peas.  One false move, the cowgirl knew, would cloud her sites and undermine her plans.

Kimberly became a legend to herself and a strange vanguard for others.  Her resolve grew like wire tentacles inside her marinated mind.  Shedding the curse of Western Civilization, she learned the ancient art of conversation.  Before you speak, listen.  Before you eat, wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Until a thought, a word, a want emerges that is wholly you, flower of your freedom.

Kimberly slimberly 1-2-3.

In the course of untold sacrifice and labor, many months and countless choices later, the empress gave birth to the child that was herself.  Her jeans flew on, enchanted carpets in a verdant world, her velvet crown, her queendom and her glory.

Photo Andreas Praefcke, a scene in the Jesuite Church in Mindelheim, Germany; the Queen of Sheba, licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License