I was visiting the decaying swamps of Brooklyn riding in a makeshift hovercraft-like airboat when I heard a loud buzzing sound that sounded like the bellow of some monstrous horsefly or dragonfly or mosquito.

I turned to Mata Hari, my tour guide of unknown foreign extraction, and asked, in her own native tongue, what would be the source of this annoying noise.

"Heeep beeeg Cupid--Cupid, who isss God 'a Loooove," was her reply, and I attributed such nonsense to obscure native legends and myths yet unplundered by the minds of petty scholars and academics.

But before I had had ample opportunity to jeer and taunt this culturally-inferior protege with my supreme skepticism, I was instead proven the buffoon...by the appearance, overhead, of a strange, winged creature the approximate size of a Cobra attack helicopter.

This creature's most immediately alarming aspect was the incredible velocity with which its huge pair of twelve-foot-long wings vibrated against one another in the air, thus enabling it to hover and dart and maneuver this way and that with the greatest of ease. Indeed, the thing flew with the utmost skill and grace, the dexterity of which convinced even me--the most sober of unbelievers--that it was truly some living organism, and not just an abstract legend.

I sensed that we were in immediate danger, so I quickly pulled Mata Hari and myself further into the dense cover of soggy swampland where we'd parked the airboat, in the midst of a thick field of seaweed and cottontail. Almost as if the thing had singled us out, however, that bastard creature stayed right with us, and it wasn't but another thirty or forty seconds before I had the most unwelcome opportunity to observe it close-up.

The first thing about it was that it was pink, far more pink than anything found in nature. And it was fat. Very fat. With a huge, distended belly that belied the fact that, wings included, the motherfucking thing must've weighed upwards of six or seven hundred pounds. But those wings--its wings were the weird part. They looked, unlike the rest of the thing, to have been constructed out of some titanium alloy; and, yet, they still seemed organic tissue, and to be growing right out of the creature's spine, in real flesh and blood, just like the rest of it...And then there was the slight matter of the beast's face. For, attached to the neck of this absurd and hideous form, there was the still-hairless and somewhat androgynous-looking head and face of a small human baby.

My guide and I thought we were still well hidden while observing this creature until it came BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZing and dive-bombing over us. It was as if the damned thing had zeroed in on us with radar similar to that of a bat or a dolphin. And I remember, even in the throes of terror, asking myself, "...What IS that...just what in the fuck is that ugly thing, that THING THAT'S FLYING RIGHT TOWARD US?!!"

And just then any and all ruminations on this subject were interrupted by my primeval instinct to survive. I upraised my trusty mini-bazooka (which I always carried with me for just such exigencies) and I fired one single, well-aimed explosive projectile straight at the left breast of this baby-faced demon.

Because of the trajectory of my high-velocity target, I succeeded in inflicting only a flesh wound. Meanwhile that damned, salmon-colored thing, now more enraged than ever, only circled, regrouped and redoubled its advances.

But in its return trip the fucking thing revealed that it possessed a way of defending itself. For, upon making perhaps its fourth pass at us in the air, after it had begun coming at us closer and closer with successive aerial maneuvers, the cherub--to our great surprise-- suddenly pulled forth, from some previously hidden sheath on its back, a bow and arrow and proceeded to shoot.

It was then that I first heard the accursed ZIIING! of its oversized arrows rushing past, just missing my right shoulder blade. But, strangely, its arrows produced a sound more reminiscent of airport take-offs and 747s than of archery ranges and Robin Hood.

ZIIING!...whooosh...ZIIING!...whooosh went the increasingly familiar refrain of its arrows, as they whizzed just barely past me and my sidekick--apparently missing us due to the thing's lack of skill as a bowman. Even so, with every second, the distance between our flesh and the metallic point of each arrowhead shortened. It was just a matter of moments before the fiend hit its target and reduced us to human pin cushions.

Just when Mata Hari and I began supplicating to all ancient and forgotten gods, a bona-fide miracle dropped out of the sky and flopped into our laps...For, at that very moment when we were convinced that the winged corpulence was about to do us in, we felt our breasts lightly grazed by the point of its missile.

Before it had had a chance to fire another round, a giant flyswatter emerged from the clouds.

It was a green plastic flyswatter. But it was at least the size of a basketball court. And who or what held onto it, if anything did, was unclear: its pea-colored handle trailed up and out of sight into the stratosphere.

Suddenly, down came the flyswatter and, in a single motion, it smote the faery dead.

Mata Hari and I went to Las Vegas and got married.