During the elongated years everyone stretched.

Some were not unattractive this way. Women on the whole fared better than men, who merely appeared cadaverous to varying degrees. Certain weighty women of the proper proportions— though still ponderous in stance and movement—became irresistibly vulpine, the height of high fashion. Vogue models were extended to grotesque stick figures.

It was not only the physical world that elongated but the passage of time itself. Days were stretched so far that some of us took to nodding off in the middle of the afternoons. Not that we never had before.

Dinner parties, at least the dull ones, became intolerably prolonged, often resulting in several suicides before dessert could be served.

A visit to the dentist was like a sentence to Dante's Hell without the poetry.

The nights seemed as if they would never end. In the elongated dark there was time for anything to transpire. As we shifted our pillows and bodies this way and that we would drift in and out of a twilight world, never completely conscious and never fully asleep. In this halfway place, dream life warred against dream death. Dream symbols took on the dimensions of parsecs.

Our lives were stretched beyond their limits.

Elongated sex proved our salvation. The male orgasm achieved a duration formerly known only to the female. The female orgasm found time to develop such breadth and depth that even Kama Sutra sex adepts of the mysterious East were lost in its infinite fathoms.

Now that the elongated years have passed and our protracted travail is history, it is strange how we at times recall those days with a certain fondness. Stranger still that some seem to crave the return of unnatural length to our lives.

We are again our normal sizes. The seconds and minutes move forward at a regular pace, clicking with diurnal insistence. The clocks keep melting as we knew they would. And I can't help wondering if it could all be over before we ever elongate again.