INTERLUDE: MAURA'S TALE
"So, tell me again about this dream," the Coroner's daughter chirped brightly, bright as the sunlight in the Mallorys' kitchen that was belt-sanding my hangover. Oh, what a fine boy she would make, with that fine white hair boxed in the back and bobbed around her ears.
Sigh. I had brought no myrtles to Venus for longer than memory permits. Plenty of fags in this town, like Chuck Adams who runs the other barpershop on 66 going up toward Sleuthwood Hill, but queenie's chained to his schedule, and not really my type anyway. I like them...
Well, I like them tall, and slender, with black hair, and a face like white blown glass. Surprised? Just wait. I've gone so far ahead of myself I've tapped myself on the shoulder.
"After a certain point, it just... broke off..." I managed bravely, looking into my coffee and making silly faces, to quiet myself. (I saw Rich's dear daughter think I wasn't seeing her hide the smile.) "I dreamed it was never really anyone but me, that the stories just ran out and I started tattoing the bodies myself, just so I could finish the story. It wasn't really done, but I remember waking myself up screaming I FINISHED IT! I FINALLY FINISHED IT!"
Maura had crossed the room before I even noticed. When she hugged me, I nearly jumped out of my chair and knocked it backward, but she was strong for her size.
"I have dreams like that, too," she said in a soft, sick voice like a tumor being yanked out of that marble throat. "The kind you wouldn't believe."
"Try me," I told her, and waited. When she began to speak, I was spellbound. Artist, Hell no. Author. Muse. But she'd balk, balk, balk from the early twenties of Knowing It All. I gave her both my horrified ears, and calmed at someone else's nightmare, and let the lady speak for herself...
COURTESY CALL
Originally appeared in Tiny Terrors #2, Paula Wilson-Buckle, ed.
"No, there's no message. This is just a courtesy call. We'll try him another time. Thank you. 'Bye now!"
"Wait, what's a courtesy call? WHO IS THIS?!? WHAT IS ALL THIS SH--" CLICK.
At eight AM, Malahavis Inc. smelled like hot coffee and smothered hope. I absently rubbed a squeeze of cocoa butter onto my slowly-distending belly beneath my black hoody, staring out through the vertical blinds, stapling on a smile.
Far below, the dialer whined into warmth. The calls began percolating through. Outside, the skies over Northern Pennsylvania glowed breathtaking blue. There was snow on the way. I could smell it. Not like it would excuse us from work, even if we got two feet dumped on us at once.
Every morning was the same drill. I'd wake up at six, go in the bathroom and sit on the john for about an hour. Dr. Meyer told me I could expect a lot of pain because I have such a small frame. He also said I could expect to have the twins cut out of my gut.
That was bad enough. Between the pregnancy and my job, my body and soul both constantly felt like they needed to take a giant shit at all times. Especially in the morning.
Over breakfast at the kitchen table, I'd always get lost in a sketch by a crazy Dutchman, one that Justin framed and hung over our phone stand. You've probably seen that Escher picture, the one of the little wooden drinking-bird with the cork in its beak, forever poised halfway up and halfway down over a pint glass of water.
I thought about that gooney-bird a lot at work, on call after call, through the endless variations of objection and response, objection and response, up and down. It was so hard in those days not having a smoke first thing in the morning. But I'd settle for something appropriately loud on my Honda's CD player the whole two miles to work through the dead museum façade of our railroad ghost-downtown.
My work rose up out of Eleventh Avenue like a stone-and-glass temple to gods no one wanted to know about. The blinds were usually drawn. The townfolk didn't have a clue what went on in there, or want one, either.
More often than not, thinking of Justin got me out of the car and in that door. Our babies were growing under his sheltering hand, heart and mind just as much as they were inside my trembling womb. I just wanted to lie in bed with him for hours and talk and laugh and read to each other and solve all the worlds problems, the way we used to do.
But we had so little time to do anything except mumble a quick hello and collapse. Was this what marriage would be like? No, thank you, I'll have the chicken.
The calls slowed down to a stop almost immediately. I slid my headset off and pulled up Solitaire on my workstation. Malahavis' network 'server,' if the word even applied, was cobbled through the building with chicken blood and murmured incantations. If too many people tried to play Solitaire at once, the whole system would lock. But before eleven, it was still safe.
When I first started working there, a vet named Glenn used to slip me blue Valium on the bad days. Most of the vets at Malahavis popped tranquilizers like Tic-Tacs. Glenn was gone and I was pregnant with twins. There was no easier, softer way. Sigh.
It was hard to believe that Justin was only five blocks away, flying a desk at Indian Valley News. J.B.'d just given him an atta-boy raise the previous month. We could have gotten by without me working. Maybe. Justin was dead set against me working, after we found out we were pregnant.
We went right round, round, round like a record about that, too ... and he said something that was so funny I just looked at him for a second and the next thing I knew, we were tickling each other and knocking things over, and ... I just never thought a twenty-something aging skate punk could be so moved by maternal biology. Oh, what a hoot. But --
"Hon, those people are parasites," Justin told me, "They got kicked outta New York. Come look--"
He dragged me up to the babies' room-to-be. His laptop was plugged in on the floor up there, amid a plane crash of paint trays and rollers, masking tape and pieces of coarse-grain sandpaper. After a while, I made him drag the laptop downstairs and read to me in the kitchen. The paint fumes were making me sick, and that wasn't all.
Googling 'Malahavis' tunred up thousands of hits, mostly from consumer advocacy groups. Some guy named Tom Mabe down South was suing Malahavis for breaching a Do Not Call Request. There was a report from the New York State Attorney General pursuant to Malahavis losing their business license for 'a pattern of deceptive behavior' which was metioned six times in three paragraphs.
Another Southerner, a Virginian named Russell Smith, was suing Malahavis in federal court for conspiracy to defraud the United States Government. And on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. My sweetheart is a strange bird. I wondered why he was nearly popping a polyp about it.
"It's for the babies. Just so we don't have to stress about any of that later." I leaned up and kissed him.
By that point, Justin offered to get another job, or get a loan from his family. Any way around the barn, though, when I want something ... I get it. But now, in the morning, I wondered if my gloomy little Russian was more right that he knew at the time.
I was so stressed any more it was making me hallucinate, in the same way you do when you've been driving for hours and you start to see things jumping out at you. My Icky-Doctor dismissed my complaints of possible high school acid flashbacks, chuckling, "Back in my day, they said acid made your toenails curly. It's just exhaustion."
I sighed, my screen still frozen on the opening rap for whatever long-distance ripoff we were peddling that week. The calls were still frozen. I fervently hoped that the dialer would be down for a while. It was a predictive model, the kind that hangs up on people a lot before they even say "Hello."
I'd never actually seen it, but I heard things. The invisible bosses sent techs in to work on it every once in a while, pestiferous little gnomes with long hair and stoned faces, who walked like they had prolapsed in their pants and were trying to worm their way to the bathroom to tuck their assholes back in.
Without fail, the gnomes always muttered on through, down to the back door in the kitchen marked "RESTRICTED AREA" every time the dialer went down. They never spoke to us, nor we them. Malahavis was awfully clique-based that way (or so I thought at the time.)
"How you feel, baby?"
I jumped in my seat. "Aaa. Hrrf. Hi, Ron. Didn't hear you come in. Sorry ---"
"Get your breath," he replied, sitting down beside me and scooting his chair back. "How much sleep you get last night, mamacita?"
"Not enough."
Ron frowned and began to clean his fingernails with one blade of a gargantuan Swiss Army Knife. The the calls started coming back in. I got an answering machine the first one out and disabled the call. Then I was locked up again. From over on the other side of the office, the booming drawl of Mike the assistant stuporvisor rang through all our ears. "GOOD MORNING, MALAHAVIS."
"Mornin', Mike," everyone mooed back with all the enthusiasm of cattle in a slaughtering chute.
Near the end of the row, Samantha was already hard at work knitting and taking calls at the same time three seats down. Jeff, the Hefé (as we called him around the office) sat beside her, fuming and not talking much. The Hefé was married. He flirted a lot. It seemed to be a genetic imperative. I don't know that he ever followed through with any of it, nor could I have cared less. He was headed for the Burnout Place, and fast.
"HOW'S EVERYONE DOIN' THIS MORNIN'?!"
MOOOOOOOO.
"All RIGHT!!! Polly is uhhh otherwise occupied, so ... we're gonna have bays number one through three doing ..."
Yeah, yeah. I knew what I was doing today and tomorrow. I wondered why I even bothered trying to be an artist. Humans would never evolve. What was I thinking? Why was I still doing this shit?
"REMEMBER TO BE ASSUMPTIVE, AND THAT WHEN A CONTACT SAYS NO, IT IS MERELY BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION TO SAY YES. INCENTIVES WILL BE DISTRIBUTED IN A FEW WEEKS. WE ARE SORRY FOR THE DELAY, BUT WE WILL KEEP YOU POSTED."
After about three hours of the usual shift, still treating every call like it was the first call, I'd be snapping, taking deep breaths and using up the maximum allowable Unavailable Time, convinced that we were going to be out on the street, that I couldn't sell a space heater to an Eskimo --
"REMEMBER, PEOPLE, IF YOU HAVE A COMPLAINT, PLEASE SEE YOUR SUPERVISOR ... BUT THIS IS NOT BURGER KING. YOU CANNOT HAVE IT YOUR WAY RIGHT AWAY."
What was I doing thinking about all that first thing in the morning? At that rate, I wouldn't last half a day. Family and Medical Leave Act be damned, here's your hat, what's your hurry and don't let the door hit you on the way to the Pennsylvania Employment Department of Misnomers ...
No. BOOP. Damn. "Hello, may I speak to Peenoosh Azizi?" Chortle. "No, no message. I'll try back later."
The bays were filling the whole way up with latecomers. I kept dipping my beak in the telephonic water glass, up and down, endlessly ... Through all the nit-picky little rules we were cattleprodded into following to the letter or Down the Road You Goes ... Through Management's utter refusal to listen to anything we had to say, smug in their self-assurance that for anyone who quit there'd be a hundred more itinerant slackers to fill all the bays ...
The room washed white. I saw haloes around everyone as I coldly, finally got to the root of what made me so sick about that place. It made no sense. None of it. Why was the script-structure so contingent on getting suckers' ... excuse me ... contacts' ... information exactly right in triplicate?
What was it that we were really signing people up for? I'd had so many complaints of repeat calls after Do Not Call requests that I lost track, and I wondered ... Why was the equipment kept so deliberately old? The bosses down in Pittsburgh were rolling in money. The least they could do was standardize. They ...
"Holy shit!" Samantha hit her Mute button, disabled the call she was on and leaned over to me, pale hands stitching the air. "You shoulda heard this one just now. I call askin' for Hong Dong Do, right? And his wife goes, she goes," her voice shot up three octaves, "'He not on me, he on job!'" Everyone around roared with laughter. I managed a weak little smile, opened my mouth to make some joke about this, and the world flashed white again in my eyes and KICK. KICK. KICK.
Once, twice, three times my babies. One kick from the one, two from the other, in two distinctly different spots. How do you describe that? It was early, but no matter what Dr. Meyer said, it wasn't just gas. Gas doesn't raise the skin up on your belly, or stretch you from the inside out for that barest second ...
I don't know how to say it. I was always more visual. It's the same kind of deep thing I'd feel when I'd sit down to eat something and inwardly know, Oh. The babies like this. How can the dead sticks of words encompass that primal link to two lives I was feeding within me? How could anything?
"Don't make me have to separate you two," I whispered, patting my stomach.
Then I listened more deeply down into myself. Something wasn't right. I closed my eyes, asking my small ones what they wanted.
Both of them were scared to death.
Samantha frowned over at tme. She had a little girl herself. "You all right, honey?"
I managed a wince that tried to be a smile. "They're kicking."
Sam clapped her hands. "I wish I had a stethoscope! That's so cool! You're what -"
"Almost three months."
"That's ... oh, well, I guess with twins and all." She talked too fast. One of those pale hands raked her sandy hair out of her face as she pulled up Solitaire for the third time. "I can't imagine ... Oh, hey, stranger. Long time no see! I thought you quit."
Glenn, of all people, my old Valium fairy, grunted something, pushing an empty chair back and scooting it partially in on the other side of me. Ron had his nose buried in the paper, but waved a hand up from its depths.
Glenn made no acknowledgement to this. He was limping quite badly, swivelling one leg forward at a time. His face was waxen, coated in sweat. Sam wrinkled up her nose.
"What's that smell?"
Glenn glanced over at her, face focusing visibly, and shrugged. Something clicked in his throat for a second when he talked. His voice was a burbling, congested rasp.
"I've ... been working down in the basement. It's the ... when you work around electronics a lot, you-"
"Silicon." I said softly. "It smells like hot silicon."
Glenn nodded. "Yeah. Some of it ... Takin' apart that whole bank, there's ... well, whatever they use to grease up the printer motors and --" He shrugged. "I used ... to work for U.S. Steel, and it was ... even worse. Down in the light. The red light. In. Red. Down. Down."
Glenn's head swivelled toward me. The flat, dead look in his dark eyes shut me right up.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed the little prescription bottle emerge from one pocket of Glenn's ragged gray chinos. Nice to know there were some constants in an ever-fluid universe. The calls began to come in again. I prepared myself for another round. Then ---
"MAURA MALLORY, PLEASE REPORT TO THE FRONT OFFICE."
"Hail, Emperor," Ron said toward me out the side of his mouth. "We that are about to die salute you."
I punched him in the arm as I got to my feet. "Yeah, yuck it up now, Ron. You're next."
But I didn't tease him too hard about anything. Ron was Special Forces, back in 'Nam. He used to be the phone room director for the Powersburg Symphony. I saw the way that Ron's hands shook sometimes. In the halcyon antique summer when I first started, he'd been coughing up to go in on take-out Chinese just before lunch break. When he did, that first time, a one-year chip from Alcoholics Anonymous fell out of his wallet.
"You know," was all he said at the time, "Shit, you Irish. You was probably sittin' on the Big Book for a booster-seat at dinner time."
"Nope, standing on it to reach Pappy out a beer."
I got up and made my hesitant way to the front of the bay, around the corner past the washroom doors in the little creaking corridor, tagged in three-inch letters: MALAHAVIS EAT THEIR DEAD. Slowly, hesitantly, I walked on past them and knocked on the door to Polly's office.
"Maura! Hiiii!!!" The door creaked shut behind me as that chipmunk voice rose from the Radio Shack tangle of her desk. About sixteen different kinds of headsets were filed high in In-Out boxes, looking like severed insect limbs and ears.
Behind the desk, Polly had two PC's and a laptop going at once. I didn't even look at what she was doing. I didn't care. She sat there with her airbrushed makeup and her 80's diamond-dog hairdo with the bangs higher than high, beaming at me.
Her stumpy legs were crossed in her big old Star Trek chair. That silicate reek we had ragged Glenn about was a choking miasma barely offset by Tabu and air-neutralizer.
"If this is about this past Wednesday--" I started to say.
Polly stood, overbalancing a little and then righting herself. For a moment, her dark eyes were flat, dead, hate-filled, insectile. Then that smile glowed brighter.
"We are not all out to get you, dear." That comment was so random it made me sit up and listen. "Please! You've been doing some great work lately! You're in the top percentile! Did you know that?"
I took a deep breath, trying to conquer the mother of all head-rushes, hearing myself say: "Cut to the chase, Polly. What ... Have ... I Won?"
Her smile didn't give an inch. I wondered if she'd ever been to high school, or born of man and woman, or had a cold, or gotten laid, or taken a good old country dump. "Well, that's just it. We're getting a night shift going, but we haven't been talking it up much. Just for the ..." Something clicked in her throat when she spoke. "Just for the heavy hitters. Are you ... are you interested?"
KICK.
KICK.
"Sure." My eyes were whiting out again. "When does it-"
Polly leaned forward. "Well, we're having a meeting about it tonight. Seven-thirty. You ... are you ... all right? Do you need to go home for a little while?" she asked. "It's ... you won't be penalized or anything. Just make sure you sign out."
After the question, she was already talking to my back.
I drove the two miles back to our ghetto-fabulist duplex over on Canal Street, blaring loud Tom Waits tunes on the stereo. I knew I couldn't tell Justin about this. As Ron woudl say, he'd lose his natural mind. I wouldn't be going to work anymore. I knew we could get tons of welfare with the twins on the way, but ...
Something just broke inside me. I couldn't go back. I wept the whole way home, just to tell my children I was sorry. I was sure they already knew all that and quite a bit more, but making my head know things as well as my body did was a very difficult matter across the board that day.
After several hours of pregnant sleep, I woke dazed, unsure if I was still dreaming even after I got up to pee. I actually woke myself up saying, "Hello, this is Maura Mallory calling on behalf of ... "
My brain wrestled itself two falls out of three the way back to work. I barely remember the drive. After some point, I was standing on the flat stretch of sidewalk just south of the Malahavis Building. The blinds were completely closed. In the back, the break room was lit up like an old Christmas tree.
There was a can of police Mace in my purse if things got weird. I took it out and put it in the pocket of my jeans. My feet seemed to know which way to go, crunching my battered black sneakers through rocksalt on the clean walks. Overhead, the sky was graying up fast. As I approached the building, it began to snow.
A strange Hansel and Gretel stood under the overhang in front of the building, looking over their shoudlers at the door every so often. There was some kind of plastic jug sitting behind them. They might have been waiting for a ride.
The girl had a black bob haircut. Two locks of her bangs were longer than the rest, streaked a funny silver color. She was smoking a cigarette. When she saw me coming, one tiny hand flicked it gracefully, guiltily away into the street, as if I were a teacher or walking in some equally unfathomable pair of shoes my feet weren't quite big enough to wear.
The boy was tall and thin, with black plastic glasses and a spiky mop of blond hair that was vaguely like mine. He wore a weird gray coverall and double-soled black sneakers. The girl wore an old-timey velvet dress, silver Doc Martin boots with funny straps, and a black down jacket.
Both of them looked they were about fifteen. The family resemblance between them was unmistakeable. Their heads swung toward me.
"M---m--m---." The boy was trying to spit out a word as I approached. The girl got right up in my face, putting one hand gently on my shoulder.
"Don't go in yet," she whispered. "It's not ... "
The boy stepped up beside us. I noticed that he talked with his hands a lot. I also noticed that the first two fingers on his right hand were made of shiny black alloy, and bent more slowly than the rest. Part of me wondered how much a rig like that cost. He spoke very slowly, standing between me and the door.
"I'm -m-m-m ... I mean it," he gasped. "Please. We ----"
"Okay." I folded my arms. "You have my undivided attention." My eyes closed a bit. I started doing deep-breathing, the way they were teaching us in Lamaze. "What's up?"
The clouds in the boy's eyes were darker than the sky overhead. "They- They-Once they start, they won't stop. They'll march on a road of b-b-b-bones. You have to c-c-c-c-cut them off at the kn-kn-knees. You -----"
The girl looked at her brother and shook her head. "We don't have much time," she whispered. "We've come a very, very long way. You ... M-M- ... Maura, it's ... It's already been decided."
She picked up what was sitting beside them, handing it to me with effort and sloshing sounds. "This is just an assignment for History class. But, yeah ... you'll know."
I blinked. Then there was no one in the doorway. This was getting a bit out of hand.
I stepped out of the alcove, over to the front door, and set the gascan down inside the door as I thrust it open. I was going to march right in there and quit. Pennsylvania was an At-Will state. I could quit any time I wanted.
Enough was enough. I could no longer deny that I had a busted wire somewhere in ---
Oh. Wait.
The break room was a mess. Part of a sheet cake coruscated on a piece of white cardboard in the middle of one of the long tables, a plain chocolate cake with white icing. I looked closer.
Some kind of powdered sugar or flour was baked into the dough. Too much flour, too much by half.
I looked to the right of the cake. A Styrofoam cup vomited its last dregs of tea across the table. The stain had already dried.
I could hear my Coroner father over my shoulder, and almost smell the cigar smoke of his black Carharrt jacket. "Sugar don't clump like that when its dries, dear heart ... "
I thought instead of fraternity parties and Rohypnol and GHB. My hair started to stand up. I reached in my purse and clutched the Mace like a wand.
RESTRICTED AREA the sign on the door blared in my face. Yeah, yeah. I jiggled the knob, already knowing that it was locked, but ...
The tongue clicked loudly in the lock. It hadn't shut all the way. Behind the door, the hot silicon smell made me stop and heave my guts in the corner.
The new cement stairs went a long way down. They felt sticky. I was conscious of a whining sound in my ears, an electronic mosquito scream just above the reach of human hearing. Down on the landing, where more stairs fell away---
I became conscious of what I was walking in . How -
KICK.
KICK.
I thought of the cake. And the tea. Just what little I saw, what little that would be gone in the morning. Most of the old vets here were pillheads. And the dose of Roofies or whatever they were would have been hard to get right to knock out some of the hardcores like ...
Ron Walker lay at the bottom of the stairs with his neck broken. In death, he appeared tired and pissed off and eighty years old. It looked like he'd been thrown down the stairs, but just before that ...
His Swiss Army knife was still clutched in one hand. He'd been working on his left wrist. Someone else saved him the trouble. The high-frequency whine grew louder, and was joined by heavy thudding sounds from much further down.
I knew I was crying, but couldn't stop. On the landing, I folded Ron's arms, making sure not to touch the wound, rolled him on his back and closed his eyes the way Dad said he did it on duty. After a moment, they closed, and I tiptoed further down ...
Into red light that ran with shadows, spiderwebbed with fiberoptic cables as thick as my ankles and equipment that would probably never see the light of day. I stood there, smelling wet old stone and hot silicon for a long time, finally understanding what time it really was down there.
I had no idea how this was possible, or why no one was told. All I could do was look on.
Further below, the gooney-birds bobbed up and down, up and down, harnessed into reconverted chairs with the back stripped off. Exposed, gleaming spinal columns shone with thick gel to prevent scabbing on exposure to air. In that room, each caller was stripped bare, facial flesh frozen in a twitch rictus, grotesque waxen masks with cables snaking from their exposed vocal chords, the skin chemical-cured to the plastic in webs.
Down there, the real dialer drained off the one from upstairs, sucking out all the good marks, the plum leads ... The gooney-birds bobbed up and down, up and down, wired into big black processors at the bases of their chairs. All of those were wired into a central hub in the middle of the floor.
Every now and again, one of the columns would flash bright wihte. The last gasp of some old geezer or geezess (in Kenosha, Wisconsin or Durfur, Oregon; Bhopal or Bratislava or Berlin, Zanzibar or Zelionople, reaching into space ... ) would echo up and down the bays as loud as cannonfire. With their teeth, the gooney-birds would applaud. It took a while to understand.
"Please Sign Up Now" we always joked at the end of every script run-through. "Your Immortal Soul in three easy installments ... " But my brain closed on the thought, on the thudding sounds, as ----
One of them was rigged into some kind of walker, with legs that leaned and balanced forward one slow step at a time, coming around the corner very, very slowly. I saw a sneaker flap loosely on one thudding metal foot.
The Hefé face swivelled toward me, frozen in a goofy grin.
"Promotion," the thing that had been Jeff Spicer informed me. Then I was running upstairs as fast as I could. Everything was white. I didn't run out the front door, but back into the bays with the gascan that the young girl had left behind, the big old plastic gascan with the spout on it.
It wasn't gas that came out when I began splashing it everywhere, but something with a reek almost like booze or rubbing alcohol. The spout only poured when I touched the top of it. I made sure that the whole place would go up.
Finally, I stood in the other doorway in the back o fthe break room and poured a good bit down the stairs ... and then ran like hell, the whole way to the front, lighting a cigarette and flicking it into the sopping trail I'd left. Whatever it was, the stuff smelled like high-quality pot when it burned.
I stood in the front door for a second, my face bright with color. The flickering Halloween light reflected back double from my eyes in the plate glass as I raised both middle fingers.
"Thank you so much," I cried loudly. "'BYE NOW!!!"
In the distance, I could already hear the wail of fire sirens. I made like a baby and headed out.
I sold the patent on that gascan for a quarter of a million dollars to a beady-eyed schmuck from Texaco R&D who gave me a meeting after I left messages on his machine everyday for four weeks straight. (This was in State College. I had to pay my own way down there.)
Jimmy Slade, the rep, looked at me funny the whole time. He said the stuff in the can was ethanol, which Model T Fords used to run on just as easily as gas. His people were quick to inform him that the ethanol was made from British Columbia smoking-grade hemp. "How did you come by this?" was the second thing he asked.
I shrugged, hoping I looked innocent. "Some kid just handed it to me on the street."
His smile grew oleaginous. "Sure they did. Now, if you could just fill out these forms, we'll discuss a settlement ..."
As a great writer name Richard Lupoff put it, I left the matter with the proven track records and in the capable hands of our elected officials and corporate warlords.
And in doing so, I freed my new family. The ends justified the means, as you'll see.
All of that was many years ago, before Justin's Pulitzer and my new job. I work for the Mabe Institute as a lobbyist. We're working on drafting a constitutional amendment to bank junk mail, with the full suport of President Bayh. They've finally found meds that work for me, and I barely ever have nightmares anymore.
My little boy, my Gareth, is doing worlds better, too. The son of a bitch who ran him down got 99-to-life. It pays to have friends in D.C. Criminal Court. The speech pathologists at the M Street Center have almost gotten him over his stutter, as well.
He's on the donor list for a new middle and index finger, but kids his age are so rarely organ donors that it might be another few years with the prosthesis. Gareth wants to paly the bass guitar more than anything in the whole world. I think he will
Now, his little-by-one-minute sister Discordia has no excuse. Diz is very bright and gets good grades, but she's a tomboy hellion just like I used to be. Justin and I are forced to look at things from the other side of the armchair, laughing at how much we have turned into our folks. Although ... you know, when Diz streaked her hair silver the other night without asking first ...
Well, I never said a word.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Mercury Retrograde Press.
Copyright © 2009 by Edward Morris
First Electronic Edition—published 2009
ISBN 978-0-9819882-9-0