Effective immediately, Johnny America is on hiatus. We will return in July.

There’s a bounty of great stories in our archives, so if you’re a new-ish reader of Johnny America, know that there’s enough in the archives to keep you reading for days.

You can still order a copy of the print edition from our online shop or find it at one of these fine retailers. As always, orders from our online shop are likely to arrive fashionably late; our order fulfillment department is small and quite fond of napping.

Yrs,

J.A.

When I look at the photograph, I don’t remember much. I remember Delores wanted us to paint our cheeks. I think I may have been the one to think of the red arrows. But there we stand. I am smoking the cigarette and Delores is holding the bottle of Dewar’s Scotch We look casual, as if only slightly interested in the photographer. I don’t remember a cow skull sitting in the yard. The window curtains are pulled aside as if someone were watching from inside the cabin. I don’t remember the second photograph at all. I don’t remember making a kissy face at the camera or holding the bottle up to Delores’ mouth. I don’t remember the car in the parking lot. For some reason most of that afternoon is blocked out. I don’t intend to find out why either. Maybe something bad happened. Maybe Delores remembers but you can’t ask her because she’s dead. I heard she killed herself. Maybe she was haunted by something. I don’t know. I doubt it. I don’t know why people are coming around asking me about these photos. The past is the past right?

I stop the WAVE File that Jimmy has emailed me. I feel uncomfortable sitting on the train by myself.

I have no reason to feel this way. The train isn’t crowded. There are two women in their sixties sitting a couple of seats in front of me and I don’t want to think of what I have just listened to, so I concentrate on their conversation instead. One of them is laughing in a boisterous way that makes me embarrassed. I have no reason to feel this way. Why can’t a person be happy? Why can’t a person express joviality on public transportation? I close my eyes. I listen to the sound of their laughter and somehow the laughter morphs into a vision. In it

I am dancing with a man I can’t recognize. He is laughing and I can smell the gel in his hair. He has his hands on my waist. He is saying my name of over and over, but it isn’t my name.

I struggle against him but he has put a hand behind my head. I can’t turn away from him. He has this intense look and I want so badly to figure out why his eyes have changed color.

But now I am back on the train and I still hear the women laughing. I stand up and walk towards the snack car for a Coke.

At the apartment I am scalding some artichoke soup. My mind is on the photos. Jimmy is texting me from his favorite Pub downtown, Lucky Jacks.

What did you think of the interview?

Instead of sleeping with my arm around his back like I used to, I now slept cradling the photos near my neck, a fear that someone might steal them in the night. They are becoming my most prized possession.

He helps me research them on our days off from work. I start looking at the back of the photos trying to when the photos were taken. The back is stamped with Kodak/Velox paper but there is no date. I start thumbing through the Beckett book, trying to look for names and dates, something I had never thought to do. I find it on the inside binding. The first name is Linnie and a last name I can’t pronounce with an address written in cursive on the first page.

I get sleepy while watching a television program about the plague. I turn on the laptop and listen to the interview again… I am so obsessed with hearing her describe what was happening the day of the photograph, what was going on in her head They are just ghosts staring at us and daring us to guess about their lives.

I look hard at the photographs. I try to figure out which one is Linnie and which one is Delores. In my head they become like Thelma and Louise. Maybe they are escaping poverty or bad marriages or addictions. But are they escaping something or just having a good time? There is something desperate in their postures. Almost as if they are forcing themselves to have a good time. It is then that my imaginary narrative changes Are they sisters? Are they themselves lovers? I fall asleep wondering why they chose to paint the arrow on their cheeks. I get chills on my arms. I guess they really were like Thelma and Louise. One of them was anyway.

I text him back.

How in the world did you find this?

Jimmy texts me again 15 minutes later and tells me to check my email. It is a link to a unsolved murders website. I see Linnie’s name with the odd German surname in stark black lettering. Above it is the name of the victim. Her name is Delores. Linnie is listed as the last person to have had contact with Delores. They found her body near Green Lake Park.

The cause of death was listed as unknown but because of the circumstances Delores’s family thought she had probably been murdered. The interview was from the website. Someone from Delores’ Family had long ago tried to contact Linnie but she wasn’t interested in rehashing the past. She obviously felt it wasn’t her problem.

I water the plants, and make a half-hearted attempt at sweeping.

I met Jimmy at the bookshop where I found the photographs. We were browsing in the same section.

We both spotted the book at the same time. A rare copy of Samuel Beckett’s Whoroscope. It was two-hundred dollars and I splurged, convincing myself it was an extravagant Birthday present. We struck up a conversation and before I knew it we had made a date to have coffee the next day. At the register I noticed the photos sort of fall out of page 15 and I tucked them back carefully, not fully realizing what I had found.

Jimmy comes in late from the bar and wants us to get into the hot tub. We change and get in and he reaches over and pulls my hand into his trunks. I get out of the hot tub and go inside to get myself a glass of wine. He follows me inside, and tries to pull me over to the couch. I resist at first but then he has my swimsuit off and he’s doing things to me and I still can’t stop thinking about the photos.

The next morning he has written a note on the bathroom mirror with shaving cream.

She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.

He has written me a line from Beckett’s book.

The dreams and visions continue on and off for weeks. Mostly always nightmares involving A woman crying and a man pleading with her and then the woman looks at me and I see horror in her eyes.

I feel consumed by the photos, obsessed even. My own life not seeming to matter anymore.

I lay the pictures flat on the coffee table and go into the kitchen to fix myself some coffee. When I come back I spill some on the corner of the photo and curse myself for being so clumsy. “Dammit!”

I am in love. I am suddenly seized with the urge to get the pictures out of my head forever. I walk over to my purse and take out the Ed Hardy lighter and walk outside to the porch. The photo starts to quiver before I snap the lighter. When it’s white edge meets the flame it burns slowly at first, then faster. I watch as first Linnie and then Delores and the bottle between them disappears into brown, and then finally, black.

They were a faded pink, cotton, worn thin in the crotch, a turquoise butterfly stamped on the front, right above where I imagined the owner’s bush would end and her downy stomach hair begin. I paced with the panties held over my mouth and nose like a SARS mask. They smelled of Mountain Breeze detergent. Usually I’m not one for synthetic breezes, but right away I could tell those panties belonged to my perfectonehundredpercentamazingsoulmate. They belonged to a woman whose dresser drawers were full of a rainbow assortment of Victoria Secret undies and were a leftover from her more innocent days that she wore when laundry day approached. No doubt about it. They were a pink missive from the Patron Saint of Lonely Fat Bachelors.

I let my roommate Harry give them a sniff and he rolled his eyes back in his head and said, “Oh, I do love the meadow in the spring, when the buttercups are in bloom.”

“What do you think I should do?” I asked. “I’m sure these panties belong to my soulmate.”

“No doubt about that.”

“So what do I do?”

“You go door to door. If the panties fit, she’s the one for you.” I must have looked a little hesitant, because he added “If you don’t find her, I will.”

I couldn’t have that. Harry and I had a long history where every time I liked a girl, he’d bumble his way into bed with her somehow and then the girl and I would become lifelong friends after they broke up. I had to find that girl before he did. I put the hoagie in the fridge for after a passionate fuck with the girl of my dreams. We’d split it.

I gave a shave-and-a-haircut on the door of the apartment directly below mine. The floor shook and footsteps came thudding down what must have been a long hallway like ours. When the footsteps stopped the light in the peephole blinked out and I stood there for a good five minutes listening to heavy breathing behind the red metal door. I had no idea who lived there. I’d only met one of my neighbors, and that was when the guy living next to me locked himself out of his apartment and wanted to exit my bedroom window and cross the fire escape to his room. I let him, but I kept an eye on my wallet. Finally the door opened up.

She was geographic. Her body spanned continents and eras, and I wasn’t sure she’d fit through the door frame. Her wet and dirty gray hair clung to her forehead. She was eating off-brand orange cheese puffs from a jumbo-sized jar, orange fluff tucked up in rolls of her finger fat, and she was wearing a floral print muumuu that made her look like a prairie at dusk. But still, I thought I could sense she was beautiful once, maybe around the time Cleopatra was. I held the panties up to her thighs, too disgusted to roll them up one of her cankles. They wouldn’t fit.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked. Her voice was ogreish and tuba-toned.

“I’m looking for my soulmate.”

“If she fits in those, it ain’t me.”

“Do you have any daughters?” I asked.

“Yes I do,” she said, stuffing cheese puffs into her cheeks and smacking loudly.

“May I talk to them? I’m looking for my soulmate.”

“You got a telephone, you can talk to anybody,” she said.

“Ha-ha. Yes, or a computer. So no one else inside?”

“Well, Bebe.”

“Bebe?” Bebe! Flapper sex on a gilded beach!

“My golden retriever.”

“Oh, I see.” I could never get off to bestiality, but I thought I could try. If that’s what the Patron Saint of Lonely Fat Bachelors wanted, that’s what the Patron Saint of Lonely Fat Bachelors would get. “Could I meet her? I like golden retrievers.”

“I don’t see why not.” She shifted her weight from foot to foot until she was facing down the hallway. A pool of sweat had gathered in the small of her back, and her muumuu had ridden up. Her backside had the overall appearance of a map showing a road leading to a pond and surrounded on all sides by the Great Plains. A man could get lost among those dead flowers and broken dreams. For all I knew, some had.

“Come here, Bebe!” the woman yelled. “Here Bebe!” Jingles came down the hallway, a dainty bell around a daintier collar.

Bebe slipped between the woman’s legs. She was as fat as her owner, looked like a body pillow covered in shag carpet. I knelt down and told her how beautiful a puppy she was and petted the length of her body, slipped the panties over her golden-haired haunches. She looked like someone had tried to shrink-wrap her ass in cotton. It was a no-go. I pulled the panties off fast and must have caught some of Bebe’s hair, because she gave a yelp and dashed back through the woman’s legs.

“Now what?”

The woman shifted her feet back and forth faster than before but still clocked in below average.

I thought maybe I could pave over the situation with some manners. “Well, thank you ma’am. Have a good day.”

“You’re a sick kid. I could always tell. Nothing like Harry.” She reached out to pat my elbow in slow fat motion, smeared corn product on my sleeve. “Godspeed in your search though.”

Godspeed! The rate at which I was going to fuck this woman when I found her! On the wings of Hermes with my pink missive of lust and love and fervent passion I headed next door and gave two shave-and-a-haircuts for good measure. You can’t ever be too smooth, Harry always said. This time I could feel air flowing out from around the door frame, a breeze rolling down a hill and all around me. It had to be my woman.

She was plainplainplainwhitebreadamericana. I couldn’t describe her any better than I could describe an off-white wall in a suburban dentist’s office. Her face was as bland as a stock photo of sunflowers and I pictured her sitting in her apartment, her head following the sunlight all day. Still, I thought that could be good. Maybe the sex would be amazing and I could close my eyes and think of other, more describable women.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I live upstairs and I’m looking for my dream girl.”

“That’s nice,” she said, and stepped aside to let me in.

Plainplainwhitebreadamericanathat’snice. The walls of her apartment were white andbare except for thirty-one pairs of white granny panties tacked up in six columns of five with an extra to the right.

“Nice art piece,” I said.

“Oh, those are just my panties,” she said. “It’s easier to get to them that way. One for each day of the month.”

“What do you do with the extra ones in February?”

“I wash them anyway.”

The girl was simple. Simple and nice. She was like a computer fresh out of the box: the operating system and basic software were there but otherwise the hard drive was blank. It was all wrong. There was no way my perfect girl would have a wall full of granny panties, and besides, this girl was as thin as a flagpole. There was no point in even trying them on her.

As I turned to leave I spotted on the coffee table a blue vase clearly from Target and filled with roses clearly from the bodega. “Those are nice,” I said. “You live with a boyfriend?”

“Those are from Harry up in apartment 33,” she said. “Nice boy.”

Harry! Nice boy! Harry carrying groceries, Harry bringing flowers, Harry always one step ahead!

“You know Harry?”

“Sure, met him on the stairs. We have tea sometimes. Would you like some tea?”

“Tea. I don’t drink tea, sorry, I’m hyper enough without it. Maybe some other time? It was nice meeting you,” I said.

“It was nice meeting you, too” she said, her voice like a million corporate telephone menus speaking in unison.

As I went from door to door, the story was the same. Whenever there was an answer, the woman wasn’t right, and Harry had already been there and left. There was the cougar who answered the door in a red towel, a pink cursive A embroidered over her breast, just under where the towel was tucked into itself, which was just too much for me. The apartments filled with Hispanic families who had yet to be gentrified out of the neighborhood, whose daughters had long flown the coop. The girl with a smooth complexion like plastic and hair like the original Barbie’s, someone I could play house with but never love. Not a dream girl one.

The wind was leaving my sails. How did Harry know everyone in our building, while I knew no one? I went to the next apartment, my building superintendant’s, and gave three sharp raps. I didn’t have enough steam left to be smooth. A girl who came up to my navel answered the door. She was eating an icy pop, blue. Might have been the superintendent’s daughter, but I’d never met his family.

“What?” she asked. Blunt for a girl eating a blue icy pop. Red maybe, but not blue.

“I’m looking for my perfect dream girl,” I said.

“And I’m looking for a way out of this 8,363,710 horse town,” she said. I always liked sassy women. I could tell she was going to grow up into a vixen and stay that way. The way she ate her icy-pop suggested longevity. Maybe this was one of those child-bride things and I could propose to her right then, start sending her Barbie’s and Ken’s and then buying her a car and marrying her on her eighteenth birthday. I bent to slip the panties up over her pink jogging pants and she grabbed on to them before she knew what she was doing. She stared down at the panties for a moment like I’d handed her a flier for the Pedophile Elks Club, then turned and ran inside with them, the door slamming shut in my face, the drained icy pop wrapper left behind at my feet.

That was it, I figured. I could see my shadow under the fluorescent light: another six weeks of lonely New York winter. I’d never find my dream girl without those panties, so I might as well get used to being alone, buy a comforter to shield from the cold and ear plugs to block out Harry’s effeminate sex squeals. I headed back to my apartment. I was halfway up the first flight of stairs when I heard the door open behind me.

There was a soft, calm light, a heavenly meringue beat. Long, flowing, saintly hair. A noble maroon bathrobe. It was Him, our brother of Grace, the Patron Saint of Lonely Fat Bachelors. He walked with divine purpose in my direction, his eyebrows getting bushier and blacker as he came closer, but then it was just my building superintendent, Victor or Vector or Vance. I couldn’t ever remember his name.

When he got to me he stuffed the panties into my mouth and told me to listen. I didn’t mind so much—have you ever tasted a spring breeze so soon after the winter, so fresh?—but then he grabbed my collar and got in my face, brought me back from my fantasy of rolling hills and golden locks.

“Listen,” he said. “Three tenants have called me. You need to stop going door to door with panties. If I get one more complaint.”

He let me go and I thought it was over, I could go huddle up with some hentai porn, but as I started to pull away he head-butted me in my nose.

“Why can’t you be more like Harry?” he asked. “Harry brings me home-made salsa. Hombre makes a muy picante dip.”

I stumbled back upstairs. The blood from my nose ran into my mouth and it started to taste like my dream girl was becoming a dream woman. I was partway to my room when I noticed Harry’s door was ajar and moaning and squealing was issuing forth from the threshold. I peeked inside. Harry was lying on his back and a woman was grinding up and down and around on top of him, thrashing her hair around and raking Harry’s hairless and boyish chest with her long red nails. She looked like Cleopatra + Cindy Crawford + Calamity Jane + The Babysitter + Audrey Hepburn + Eve + Lindsey Lohan + Tyra Banks + Bebe Daniels + Audrey Tautou + Karen O + The Girl Next Door + Kobe Tai + Aphrodite + Toni Morrison. Harry had a pair of red silk panties stuffed in his mouth and his hands and feet were tied to the bed frame. He looked at me and winked.

I paced, I fumed. I stacked the old pizza boxes up and placed the bloodied panties on top with a vinyl copy of the Harold and Maude soundtrack turned backwards, Cat Steven’s blissed-out face looking down at the panties like he understood it all. I crossed myself mouthnipplenipplegroin and said a little prayer: Patron Saint of Lonely Fat Bachelors, our Brother of Grace, bring bad fortune on Harry and bring me a girl. I vowed to challenge Harry to a gentleman’s duel the next time we were alone.

That was my dream girl and Harry was writhing underneath her and there was nothing I could think to do about it. I lay in my bed with the sheets bunched in my hands, my brain boiling, the pillow hard and unsupportive. To calm my mind I pictured a new and different and more perfect soulmate in a green German beer maid outfit with white stockings and red garters, prancing through a rolling meadow full of clovers and buttercups, parsnips and forget-me-nots, her green skirt bouncing up to reveal the pink panties, myself in green lederhosen merrily bounding toward her, her happy expression and open arms, my happy expression and open arms, and then I was on her, and licking her, and she tasted like a fresh mountain spring, like flowering snowballs, and then I was in her, bent over in the grass, the panties pushed aside, and I thrust into her until I planted seed aplenty. We curled up next to each other in the grass, picked buttercups and sniffed them. She held two of the golden blooms over her nipples and smiled at me. We left the rolling meadow and went back to our log cabin where we produced many blond babies. We kept a vase of sunflowers, to remind us to appreciate the small things in life. Once a month we visited the shrine of our Patron Saint to pay homage and say thanks for what he had given us. And when the babies were asleep at night, my soulmate would read me a bedtime story about the American prince who went door to door to find the woman whom the panties fit, and then brought her into his castle for long, lusty nights, and I would bend her over my knee and lift her skirt to spank her over the panties, and whisper into her ear, “you are a very, very naughty girl, Frau Cinderella.”

“You okay?” I called, and held up a questioning thumb. In hindsight, okay, this was dumb. You were clutching a tree in a storm and a racoon had just hit you in the head. The forecast had promised rain, increasing in the afternoon, maybe a little snow on high ground, but nothing like this. The twister had sucked up the smaller life-forms of the region, spat them out all over, and moved on. And how. It moved across the horizon like a coked-up Cohiba on a mission. But here, the worst was over. A toad splayed across the windscreen, dead. The worst was mostly over. The racoon slipped into a corn field.

“Do I look the fuck okay?” you said—I thought you said—it could have been anything, the acoustics were lousy out there. I opened the passenger door and you arrived on the next gust, the tips of your toes barely touching the ground. Angry wind slammed the door behind you.

“Made it,” I said, and offered a high-five, which you didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ve just been hit in the head by a racoon,” you said, between gulped breaths.

“Yeah,” I said, and if I laughed I really didn’t mean to, and apologise, again.

“You think that’s funny?” you said.

“No, hell no,” I said. But it was funny, actually. It was funny then and I can’t imagine it becoming unfunny anytime soon.

“I’m sure we’ll look back and laugh about this in-“

“Don’t!” you said. “Don’t presume to think we will stay in contact after this orfuckingdeal. Because we won’t. I appreciate the ride, really I do, but all I’m interested in is getting to the next town.”

Though visibly, the racoon had left you unscathed, I wondered if you might be in shock. You looked ahead, poker-faced, and we sat there as the weather stormed. I told you my name and tried to take your mind of things with some small talk.

“Weather, huh?” I said.

“We should get out of here,” you said.

“We should,” I said, and moved into first.

“Now would be a good time to fasten your seatbelt,” I said. You rolled your eyes and poked at the radio. Static. I was about to offer you my Tom Waits cassette when the clock lodged in the windscreen. 11:55. Neither of us said anything but I couldn’t help thinking that 11:55 was an ominous kind of time. I checked my watch, I was officially late.

Driving, driving my ’76 Capri at least, was like doing the doggy paddle in a vat of baked beans. With the wind behind us and my foot on the brake, we were pushed along at a steady 15mph. You didn’t say a word the whole time; just sat there, low in the seat with folded arms and a saispasquoi pout. A refrigerator zipped by and spilled its contents in our path.

“Hungry?” I said. Nothing.

“Who keeps bananas in the fridge?” I said. More nothing. Maybe you weren’t used to other people, or were unfamiliar with the finer points of hitch-hiking, like telling the driver your name and saying, “Thanks for stopping.” Maybe you- “Would you take your feet off the dash, if you don’t mind?” I said. Yeah, maybe not too used to other humans.

We arrived in The Hamlet of Greendale.

The Hamlet of Greendale was only a hamlet in name, it had grown some. But, still, it had a Walnutty Grove feel to it—had had—last time I’d been there, not anymore. I’d had celebratory breakfast in a diner—the worst omelette ever—after the trial had been adjourned. It looked like an omelette but in reality it was an aberration, an insult to omelettes everywhere, despite the cheese, the bacon, the onions, the mushrooms. I looked at you about then, I wanted to check if you were still breathing; you yawned.

Every structure in THOG—that’s how the waitress who served the omelette had referred to it, “First time in THOG?” she’d said—every house, church, shop and school had been levelled. In the street, the mangled remains of the burger joint’s arches brought the first stage of our journey to an end.

“Time to abandon vehicle,” I said. “There, under the courthouse, the bunker.”

“Courthouse? What courthouse?”

“Well, there used to be a courthouse above that sign down the steps to “The Bunker?” Think you can make it?”

You stepped into the street and moved to the front of the truck, where the gust got you. I’d exited downwind, luckily, and caught you in my arms. You’d still be travelling, probably, if I hadn’t. The wind knocked us ass over tit, across the street and into the entrance of the bunker. Eight ball, corner pocket. That’s how it felt, like the elements were playing pool with us. Your hair smelt of bergamot.

The citizens of THOG were less than impressed at our arrival. Three of them battled to shut the heavy iron door behind us. One of them wore a Gatekeepers tee-shirt, a local trash metal band. Inside, around the entrance, people looked up, then away. I learned later that they’d lost Leroy Fulda in the last attempt to close the door. He’d be found later, dead and bloated, four miles offshore.

“Move along now, folks,” someone said. “No loitering.”

It was difficult to tell how far back the bunker’s passageway went. It was thick with people. They shuffled forward, holding candles and torches, gas lights. They were neighbours, family, colleagues, friends, and now, as one, victims.

“Plenty of room out back,” someone called from behind.

A small round man with a shining pate and wire-rimmed glasses held out a meaty hand. I guessed he was the mayor.

“Howdy-doody,” he said. The weather wasn’t going to spoil his good cheer. “Welcome to THOG. This here bunker is the former wine cellar of Reinmund Becker, a German winemaker and one of our town’s founders. He arrived here in 1878 with stalks and stems and the shirt on his back. The stalks and stems loved the dry acidic earth, a love affair that continues to the present day. For the first half of the twentieth century our wine cellar was also the town jail. The walls are three feet thick. But because there’s no natural light, use as a jail was discontinued in 1952. Of late, The Bunker’s been a bar.” It sounded like an interesting story but the timing was all wrong. You were still beside me, but moving. I thanked the mayor and excused us. He turned to the door and welcomed more newcomers—an elderly couple and a shivering pup, the cutest thing I’d ever seen. You were ahead of me now. Afraid I would lose you, I reached out for your hand. You took it without thinking—or not—then shook it away. I curled my arm around your shoulder, but you lifted it over your head and were gone, into the labyrinth of caves and tunnels and God only knows. I watched as you weaved your way through the throng, then let go a “hey,” wishing I’d pushed you on your name, and followed.

For you, the crowd parted smoothly, conducted you further, then closed seamlessly, as if it were a life-form. No sooner had I breached the crowd, was I ejected. Breach, eject, breach. Expelled, expunged like a foreign body: unwelcome. “Could I just… if you don’t mind, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me…” The wall of citizens of THOG was insurmountable, un-penetrate-able. I dallied at the edges, then noticed my lawyer in deep conversation with the judge. I backed away but I’d already caught their attention.

“There won’t be no trial today, son,” he called to me. “I’ll ring as soon as the phone lines are fixed.”

“Trial?” said a smug citizen, and pushed his infant daughter behind his legs.

“A stalking thing,” I said. “Nothing serious, a misunderstanding.”

“You want a seat?” said a woman from behind me. She picked up the pup from the bench and placed it on her lap. I hesitated for a second, the seat she’d made free was between herself and the old dude she’d come in with. The heck, you were gone; I thanked her and sat. The old man held a cigarette to his lips.

“Don’t even think about it,” said the woman. “We don’t want to inhale your poison.”

He lit up anyway, blew smoke to the ceiling and eyed her with contempt. “That’s a twister out there, Eleanor Daley, and you’re worried about second hand smoke?”

“Excuse my husband,” said Eleanor. “He was born sans decorum.”

Eleanor and Nathaniel were lifelong citizens of THOG. Nat was a local artist who’d exhibited in places as far away as places I still knew. Eleanor was a psychiatric nurse and breadwinner. They’d fished the puppy out of a barrel of rainwater in their yard.

“We thought about calling him Spitz,” said Eleanor, stroking the dog in her lap. “After the swimmer,” said Nat.

“That’s a lot of name for a little fella,” I said. Spitz looked at me and stretched.

“You should introduce him to your girlfriend,” said Eleanor. “Where’d she go?”

“Chicks cream themselves within five paces of a puppy dog,” said Nat.

“Nathaniel Arnold,” said his wife. “I will not tolerate that kind of language.”

Nat spat. Eleanor looked at the gob of sputum on the dark ground; Spitz, too, seemed interested.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said. “She’s a hitch-hiker.”

“Is she now?” said Eleanor. “Isn’t that something?”

“Huh?” said Nat.

“What?” said I.

“I mean it’s romantic, is all,” said Eleanor. “Come on now, I can see the shine in your eyes.”

“You got the hots for her, boy?” said Nat. “Which one is she?”

“She went off to scout the joint,” I said. “She’ll be back in a while.”

Eleanor and Nat looked at me.

“Show her the dog, son,” said Nat. “Can’t hurt to try.”

“Nah, don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“It would be a pretty kitsch thing to do.”

“So you’re not that interested, huh?”

“I guess not,” I said, and smiled, and shook my head in a kind of affirmation. Old Nat had nailed it. I just wasn’t that interested. We had the makings of a good story, perhaps, at least a beginning. And we had arrival, then of course separation, all elements of good yarns. And I had Nat and Eleanor, benevolent strangers with their gift of Spitz. But that was all. I wasn’t that interested. And anyway, I’d learned my lesson.

“Here,” said Nat, and held out Spitz.

Spitz yapped—he hadn’t got his bark down yet—and wagged his tail like a pro.

“What the fuck,” I said, and tucked him under my arm, “it can’t hurt to try.”

I think of a million man-hours spent bringing us the opportunity to check our Facebook walls and Action Items while we nibble from tiny bags of honey-roasted peanuts.

The hotel bar is themed around a single football game from 1961. There are jerseys above the booths, and something called a “Pigskin-Tini” on the cocktail list. I sit at the bar next to a young business buck. He looks up from his newspaper and tells me, “We’re selling our souls to China.” I nod in a studied manner to indicate assent with his statement but disinterest in conversation, but he ignores or perhaps is ignorant of the etiquette; maybe he feels his observations are too urgent to hold at bay. “Nobody wants to make anything anymore,” he tells me, “nobody wants to put money where their mouth is and start producing.”

I ask him what his line is and he explains that he’s an executive sales manager for one of the major printer manufacturers. “Not that I’m just a salesman,” he tells me, “I coordinate the company’s regional managers, who deal with subordinate floor managers, who interface directly with the ground level sales producers, who actuate the actual sales streams.” I ask whether any of the printers his managers and producers sell are sourced from China and of course they all are. He ask what I do, so I tell him the truth: I’m working with a venture capitalist to start a magazine about meta-meetings. “You know,” I say, “meetings where you get together to meet about your other meetings; how effective they’ve been in delivering deliverables, how future meetings might be made more actionable, more trackable, more fun.” He nods, takes a sip from his mug, and asks whether we’ve picked out a name for the masthead. “Of course,” I tell him as I motion a numeral ‘2’ in the air, “‘Meetings Squared’, with the two written as an exponent.” He comments that America could get back on track if there were more go-getters like us. I motion for another glass of Zinfandel.

The baby across the aisle is squealing again. I close my eyelids, lean against the molded plastic wall of the 737’s cabin, and imagine my loathing beading onto my skin like an electric sweat, its intensity strong enough to set haywire the basic atomic forces. I picture myself slipping through the cabin’s wall, landing momentarily on the riveted aluminum wing, then waving to my former commuter companions as the jet’s velocity carries it on toward Chicago while gravity re-routes my arrival gate earthwards. I imagine myself rotating to spy for a pond or a greenhouse or a hot air balloon to crash into — didn’t that World War I pilot survive a fall of thirty thousand feet by cushioning himself with the glass skylights of a train station? — but all I see is section after section of brown and green farmland. The squealing from across the aisle morphs into an animal wail. “Yes,” I tell the flight attendant, “yes, I would like to purchase a turkey pita sandwich with low-fat tzaziki sauce.”

The bartender is too hip for the tchotchkies choking the vibe like bar like mothballs; he’s making the other convention-goers uncomfortable with casual mentions of too-contemporary and too-up-and-coming bands.

“Another round?” he asks me.

I not in affirmation and thanks. I can’t believe we’ve manage five minutes of conversation before the business mook next to me gets around to it: “You know what the problem is? China.”

I flip between the pages of SkyMall to compare competing doggy oases which enable dogs to urinate in the comfort of living rooms onto a patch of porous synthetic turf. One drains into a simple pan; the other, more expensive and luxurious model drains into a plastic cistern and features a self-cleaning sprinkler mechanism as an optional upgrade. I flip to another page I’ve bookmarked, to the personal putting green for execs who want to practice their stroke while they conference call, and I wonder if there’s room for an ‘innovention’ in the mash-up of the two: if businessmen might want to pee on the putting green in their office.

“Good evening,” the captain says over the all-cabin intercom, “it looks like we’ll be landing in Boston just a few minutes ahead of schedule. Sit back, buckle up, and we’ll have you on the ground in, oh, looks like just over 25 minutes.”

I’d like to urinate in my office, I think. I swipe the glass face of my phone, click past an advertisement for Diet Coke, launch a web browser, then order a pepperoni pizza and a two liter bottle of Diet Coke to meet me at the Hyatt. I consider my opinions about the promptness of pizza delivery drivers in general, of the likely traffic hindering my pizza delivery driver’s smooth travel to the hotel, consider whether it’s more likely he’s working his way through school or just making rent, decide that this driver deserves a three buck tip, select my method of payment, and raise my seat back to its full upright position.

With each subsequent call, all I hear is Shirking of PLC Responsibilities and Breach of Fiduciary Duty, and I immediately consider filing reports with both the Department of Professional Licensing and Regulation and the Better Business Bureau. It is only after a long, warm bath with Epsom salt, however, that I shelve my whistleblowing and walk next door to confront Duane face-to-face, client-to-PLC.

I’m about to knock again when Duane’s figure finally materializes through the screen door. He’s not wearing a shirt and there is a Scarlet Macaw parrot perched on his forearm, its talons opening and closing and drawing faint trickles of blood. He smiles like he just caught me in a lie.

“It’s good to see you, Reginald. Welcome.”

Duane’s home smells like a Bath & Body Works and, in the living room, there is a young woman sitting cross-legged on an ottoman, eating almonds from a Ziploc bag. She is also sans chemise, her stringy black hair long enough to drape her bosom, and she doesn’t avert her eyes from Barefoot Contessa to acknowledge my presence.

“I’d introduce you to Oksana but I’m afraid that, unless you are fluent in Estonian, the same would be fruitless.”

“You’ve abandoned me in a time of crisis, Duane.”

We take our tea on the back porch. It is there that Duane informs me that, effective immediately, he’s unilaterally ending our PLC-client relationship. He’s walking away from the trade altogether, actually, has already accepted an entry-level call center position with a regional auto insurance carrier. He directs my attention to the stack of unassembled moving boxes resting against the siding of the house, indicates his readiness to uproot and re-seed in Skaneateles, NY by month’s end.

“I’m reluctant to classify it as a ‘retirement,’ per se. But it feels permanent, Reginald. This economy has made beggars of us all.”

Duane insists that I not take the severance personally, reminds me of the book of business it took nearly thirteen years of Life Coaching to amass, the tens of hundreds of dollars he will be walking away from and the valued clientele to whom he must bid farewell. Today’s unscheduled appointment will be pro-rated, he continues, my initial $350 retainer refunded with interest.

“I’d be remiss, Reginald, if I didn’t suggest you press forward with a new PLC. You’re a wayward vessel, in need of mooring.”

He suggests I contact Glenda at the Agency, so that she can review my Current Needs. Ultimately, he believes Rayanne will be best suited to assume his post, what with her being a Chickasaw medicine man in a past life and the owner/operator of a functional ’98 Toyota Tercel in her current.

“She’ll come to you, Reginald. Just give her fifteen, twenty…”

“I don’t want Rayanne. I want you.”

I bring up the frayed wires, the wet floor at that Steak ‘n Shake. The exhaustive inventory of disasters averted due to Duane’s timely soothsaying. I can feel my Panic Dam swell and bulge, the wellspring of doubt on the other side poised to flood my brain and drown my future. It is then that Duane reaches across the card table, presses his gummy palm against the top of my right hand. Our eyes are magnet halves, mine wet with fear and his bloodshot from all the caffeine, inextricably locked in place.

“Reginald, why did you come to me today, seeking counsel?”

I tell Duane about Melissa, about the trips to Starved Rock with the journeyman roofer. How she returns home well past 10:30 pm CST, our agreed-upon weeknight curfew, smelling of curly fries. Could her heart belong to another?

Duane settles back into his tattered lawn chair, arms folded in deliberation.

“That bitch is definitely stepping out on you, Reginald.”

I scroll through the profiles at PsychicPsource.net in search of Duane’s successor but find nothing but charlatans. Bekah’s Power Rating is a robust 4.9 out of 5, but her primary focus appears to be reuniting pet owners with Golden Labs who break free from backyard barbeques and end up in Oregon. Mistress Sindee claims to have predicted the collapse of Lehman Brothers back in the mid-80s but couldn’t prophesize HAROLDWINNICK1’s gout. And so on.

I power down, fold the laptop over. Through the bay window I watch as Duane and the Estonian woman set up long folding tables along the sidewalk, drag boxes of useless bric-á-brac to be liquidated. The makings of a garage sale.

Soon, Duane will embrace a new era, its high-quality nature presumably clear as crystal to him for years by now. He’s already foreseen his meteoric rise to middle management, his career trajectory the stuff of legend within the industry braintrust. He already knows he has a touch lamp, adequate stapler refills. He will have benefits, health and otherwise. He will have everything in his Central New York Valhalla and time will Swiffer away our mentorship period from memory, a mere dust bunny on his life’s Formica.

As for me, I will simply be. I will sit idly by and watch as Melissa finds herself, mainly in the company of other men. I will take strange comfort in her romantic meanderings, manifestations of Duane’s final revelation. I will contemporaneously consume foodstuffs with dangerously-high levels of trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, and for no good reason at all.

I will accept that total, irrevocable ruin awaits me around every corner, skulks through every shadow, ready to bludgeon me with my own terror.

“Rough day, honey?” Jim cocked his head in her direction and stopped thumbing through the mail.

“It’s the neighbor.” She sighed hoping to evoke her husband’s pity. “I can accept it when the neighbor does not wave to me from across the lawn—that’s fine. But he parked right next to me at the farmer’s market, and you know what he said? Nothing. I find it odd and disturbing.” She looked to Jim as if he held all the answers. To her, it seemed he did. He was twenty years her senior and mingled in intellectual circles. Some even thought him to be a genius.

“Well, did you say something to him?” Jim studied a five-dollar off restaurant coupon.

“No.” She scrunched her face and smoothed back wisps of her wild hair.

Jim analyzed the situation and determined his wife and the neighbor were suppressing sexual tension. If given the opportunity, he predicted Helaine and his neighbor would make out like teens in the backseat of a Dodge Neon. All that stood between them was his presence. He abruptly vowed never to leave her at home alone again.

His mind tossed and turned over the decision. Not only was it unrealistic to always be with her, he valued trust and considered it an integral aspect of love. He decided his situation warranted a trust test.

“I bought a gym membership.” Jim fiddled with a string on his trousers to hide his lying eyes.

“Good for you!” He concluded she was being sincere and had bought into the lie.

“I think I will go right now.” He scooped up his keys and pecked her cheek. He mentally told her this is a test and she should try to pass. He closed the door behind him and drove to a nearby hill, where he parked the Toyota Avalon. He stared out the open window at his and his neighbor’s homes below.

After eight minutes, nothing had happened. She did not leave her house to knock on his door and ask for an egg or other kitchen staple as a ploy to weasel herself inside and make passionate love to him.

After twenty-two minutes, nothing had happened. He did not peep in her window to see her unbutton her polyester dress and slip into her holey Phish nightshirt. He stared directly at the houses, only watching the sky darken out of the corner of his eye. By that time, he had noticed the two televisions flickered simultaneously as if they were synchronized. They were watching the same television show. He raised his eyebrows.

After twenty-three minutes, Jim’s stomach growled. He felt around the floorboard for an old fry. That is when he noticed his loafers. He envisioned his one pair of gym shoes on the floor on his side of the closet. If she decided to poke around in there—which he felt sure she did, she would automatically know he had lied. He planned to instantly forgive her because he does the same thing while she is gone. He reasoned she had probably figured out he had lied and was wondering where he was at that very moment. He deduced this was the reason she did not knock on the neighbor’s door to ask for an egg to seduce him.

Jim concluded he should call it a day and resume the spy session another time. He noted he must bring gym shoes for the next spy session, as well as rice cakes and binoculars.

He put the car in gear and drove the short trip back home. When he walked inside, she barely looked away from the flat screen television hanging on the wall to greet him. Still, he doubted she could focus on the show with all those sexual fantasies about their neighbor playing over and over in her head.

The first publication under the Nouvella masthead is slated to be Repatriate, by Johnny America #8 contributor Matthew Salesses. We haven’t read it, but we’re obviously fans of his work.

At first we thought the octogenarian’s mind was just playing tricks on her. However, an inventory of her apartment revealed that, while all the shoes were present, several sweaters were indeed missing. So we decided to mount a security camera above her door, to catch the thieves in the act.

But on our next visit, the camera was gone. My wife’s mother maintained it too had been stolen. Eventually, she proclaimed, everything would be taken from her. Resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery, we purchased another camera and secreted it in a begonia my mother-in-law kept by the window. We could hardly wait to examine the evidence when we returned the next morning. Only, my wife’s mother wasn’t in her room. Nobody had seen her leave, and no visitors had signed the logbook.

Luckily, our begonia-cam was still present, so we immediately hooked it up to her television set. As playback began, my wife’s mother appeared napping in a chair. Then—just like that—she vanished. When I turned to ask my wife if she had witnessed the event, I found that she too had disappeared.

I never have determined if my wife was stolen or if the eradication of her mother simply made it too hard for her to exist. Either way, I still have the begonia and the second camera as evidence of her being.

Q: What do they use to take cows from one farm to a new farm, after an ax murderer sneaks onto the old farm, kills the farmer, and then makes a necklace out of his teeth?
A: A moooooooving van!

Q: What time is it when someone dies in an empty ice cream truck?
A: Time to get more ice cream!

Q: What did the pig give his cousin on his birthday?
A: A ham radio and syphilis.

A viewing of The Wizard of Oz provided the inspiration for Ginny’s second costume choice. “If I can’t be a princess,” she said, “then I guess a scarecrow is the next best thing.”

I was a zombie. I was a zombie every year but for some reason Mom never objected to that. It seemed like an obvious double-standard but it worked out in my favor. I loved zombies. I had seen Night of the Living Dead up through Day of the Dead by age 12 thanks to my best friend Ryan’s overly-permissive parents and horror-obsessed older brother. My costume consisted primarily of some strips of fake flesh peeling off my face, fake blood applied liberally around my mouth, and an arm I amputated from one of Ginny’s dolls over her loud objections. I would occasionally nibble on the doll arm, which made the adults doling out candy slightly uneasy.

I had wanted to go trick-or-treating in Ryan’s neighborhood but was instead given the task of escorting Ginny around ours. This was especially disappointing given that it would probably be my last year trick-or-treating. It was sort of an unwritten rule that once you hit your teens it’s just really uncool to go door to door asking for candy. The few teenagers in our neighborhood who still did it, a few of them brazen enough to try to pull off jeans and a hoody as a costume, were met with overwhelming disdain. Oddly enough, though, I never saw anyone actually refuse to give them candy. They just accompanied the candy with pronounced frowns and occasional eye rolling.

Adding to the disappointment of this particular Halloween was how few houses were giving away candy. A bad economy had taken its toll and at best one out of every three houses were lit up. With the remaining houses, one could see the amorphous, bluish light of the television screens bouncing off the walls as families kept the rest of their lights off as the universal sign that they were party-poopers. Ginny and I had made our way around almost the entire neighborhood and had only half-full pillowcases to show for it. We were also running way ahead of schedule due to skipping so many houses, so I figured we had time to take a detour into the neighborhood’s haunted house.

In the movies, haunted houses are always aging Victorian homes either in New England or the Deep South. In the Midwestern suburb I lived in, the oldest house standing was built around 1980. The best candidate for a haunted house was a modest split-level home that had fallen into a state of disrepair even before the previous owners had given up trying to pay their mortgage or sell the house and had instead simply packed their bags and left town. The lawn was relatively well-maintained by the surrounding neighbors, who did not want the stigma of having an abandoned, run-down house next door. There were things they could not fix, though, like the moldy shingles on the roof, the broken windows, or the cracked and peeling paint.

I pointed at the house and announced to Ginny, “We’re going in there.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s why we’re going in. It’s Halloween. You’re supposed to be scared.”

Ginny protested further, but I grabbed her by her hand and dragged her toward the house’s side yard.

“Where are we going?” she whined.

“One of the windows over here is busted open. We can get in through there.”

“I’m not tall enough!”

“I’ll lift you through.”

I walked over to the window and pushed up on the cracked and cloudy glass. It slid upward easily but without anything to prop it up I was stuck holding it open. I motioned Ginny over and told her to bring me a branch that was on the ground a few feet away. I snapped a few inches off the end and then jammed it into the window frame.

“OK,” I said. “Now I can lift you up into there.”

“Great.”

I lifted her through and then followed her in, then reached into her bag and pulled out the Halloween flashlight with the plastic Jack-O-Lantern on the end that Mom had bought for her at the dollar store. I flicked it on and it cast an anemic glow on the walls around us.

“It’s still too dark,” Ginny protested.

“Scaredy cat,” I taunted her.

“Am not!” she cried and stalked off ahead of me. I followed closely behind, not wanting her to get swallowed up by the darkness.

Soon I could make out the remains of the kitchen. Every appliance had been stripped from it, but you could see the empty spaces where the refrigerator and stove had once been. The smell of rotting food hung in the air, causing us both to gag a bit. As we made our way across the room, I heard a thumping noise coming from inside one of the cabinets.

Ginny jumped. “What’s that?”

I flung the cabinet door wide open and a mouse scurried out of it, down to the floor and away past Ginny’s feet. Ginny shrieked and started crying.

“Hey, don’t worry,” I told her, putting my hand on her shoulder. “It was just a mouse. It’s gone now.”

“It’s not gone,” she sniffled. “It’s still around here somewhere, waiting to run out and eat my toes.”

I laughed. “Oh my god. It is not going to eat your toes. Where did you get that idea?”

“I saw it on TV,” she said. “They found a dead body and mice were eating its fingers and toes and so the police couldn’t find out who it was by the fingerprints and toe prints and they had to pull out the dead person’s teeth to find out who it was.”

“That’s just a TV show. It’s not real.” I gave her the sternest brotherly look I could muster. “Besides, you shouldn’t be watching that stuff anyway. You’re too young and impressionistic.”

“Mom and Dad let me!” she protested.

Just then, we heard a loud clanging sound from downstairs in the basement. I whirled around in fright as if the source of the noise were right next to me and Ginny shrieked.

“More mice?” she suggested hopefully.

“I don’t know. Let’s go find out.”

“Why would we want to do that?”

“Because it is scary and therefore it is fun. Come on.”

I worked my way along the wall, looking for the door that led to the basement. After opening the doors to a few closets and a bathroom, I found the right one. I motioned for Ginny to follow me and then carefully made my way downstairs.

The basement reeked of mildew, rot, and a faint smoky smell. I caught a hint of movement in a corner at the far end of the room. I trained the flashlight on that spot and could vaguely make out the shape of what looked like a person huddled in the corner. The person coughed.

“Zombie!” I shouted. “Run!”

We both turned around and bolted back upstairs. I slammed the basement door shut, grabbed Ginny and headed toward the window. Without saying a word, I lifted her through the window and then followed behind her. We ran hand-in-hand from the house and were a couple of blocks away before I finally stopped to catch my breath.

I looked down at Ginny and tears were streaming out of her eyes. “I’m scared,” she cried. “Is the zombie coming to get us?”

I wiped the tears off her face. “No, it’s not coming to get us. It wasn’t even a zombie, really. It can’t be a zombie because zombies aren’t real. I just got scared because it was so dark in there. Besides, zombies don’t cough.”

Ginny sniffled and attempted to give me a hug, giving up when she realized she couldn’t bend her arms because of her costume. “Ok. If you say so.”

“Look. I need to go back there. If there’s someone sick in the basement, they might need help. You don’t have to come if you don’t want. I can walk you home first.”

Ginny’s eyes widened. “What if it’s a murderer?”

“I don’t think it is, but if so I’ve got an orange belt in Kung Fu so I could probably take him.”

Ginny looked at me and thought about it for a moment. “OK. Let’s go back.”

Walking the few blocks back to the abandoned house, we passed a group of kids going in the opposite direction who were dressed up as pirates. They all seemed to have bought the same costume from the Halloween store, which actually made them look slightly scarier, like a hoard of pirate clones. I didn’t recognize any of the kids, so we passed by them without a word.

“Yarrr!” I heard one of them yell when they were about a block away.

“Yo ho!” another replied.

We got back to the house and entered through the same window we had gone in before. I navigated my way back to the basement door with Ginny closely behind me and then we made our way downstairs. As we descended the stairs, I thought about what Ginny said about this person in the basement maybe being a murderer. Sure I had Kung Fu training, but if the person had a gun then we were in big trouble. I didn’t want to wimp out, though, so I tried not to think about it too hard.

“Hello?” I called when we reached the bottom of the stairs. “Is there someone down there?”

“What are you asking that for?” a woman’s voice responded. “You already seen me.”

I pointed the flashlight to where the voice was coming from and saw the same vague, person-like shape I had seen before. I slowly moved closer to it until I could see the woman.

“Umm… hi,” I said to her.

“Psssh,” she responded.

As I looked the woman over, the idea that she might be a zombie briefly returned to my mind. She was wearing dirty, tattered clothes and looked like she hadn’t bathed in weeks. Her face was sunken and her hair was greasy and matted. I was afraid she might start trying to claw out my internal organs at any given moment. However, rather than make a move toward me she remained collapsed in a heap on the floor looking like she wouldn’t have the energy to stand up let alone eviscerate me.

“What are you doing down here, lady?” Ginny asked. “Nobody’s supposed to live here.”

“I was sleeping, goddamnit,” the woman muttered irritably. “What are you kids doing in here? And why are you dressed so goddamn funny?”

“It’s Halloween,” I told her. “We came in here because we thought the house might be haunted.”

The woman snickered. “Wooooo,” she said. “Wooooooooo!”

I looked at the floor around where she was sitting. There were a couple of empty vodka bottles, a small pile of cigarette butts, and some syringes.

“What’s your name?” I asked the woman.

“Leia,” she replied. “Princess Leia. What’s yours?”

“What are the needles for?” I asked her, deliberately avoiding her question.

“Medicine. I’m real sick.”

“They’re for drugs,” Ginny whispered to me. “I saw it on TV. She puts the drugs in her arm and between her toes.”

“Listen,” the woman said. “You two aren’t tattletales, are you? I mean, you’re not going to go telling other people that I’m here, right? I ain’t hurtin’ nobody, just tryin’ to live, you know? Nobody was using this house anyway and I figured if nobody else, why not me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If you’re sick, maybe you should get some help.”

“Nobody’s gonna help me,” the woman sneered. “They just want to put me in jail for using my own medicine instead of theirs. Nobody, nobody, nobody’s gonna help me. So keep them away. Keep. Them. Away.”

“Are you really a princess?” Ginny asked.

The woman looked confused. “What? A princess? Huh?”

I took Ginny aside. “You’re right. This woman is on drugs. That’s why she’s acting so crazy. I think it’s marijuana. You can tell by the needles. We need to go home and tell Mom and Dad so they can call the police.”

Ginny started crying. “What will happen to Princess Leia if we call the police?”

“I don’t know,” I said gravely. “I think they have special jails for drug users and she’ll go there so they can get her off the drugs.”

Ginny cried louder. “She just wants to live!”

“Listen to your sister,” the woman said. “She knows what she’s talking about.”

“OK, lady,” I told her, “we’re going to leave and we won’t tell anyone you’re here.”

“Really?” she asked. “Aww shit, you kids are cool. Hey, little girl, why do you got broomsticks taped to her arms?”

“We’ve got to go now,” I said. “Goodbye.”

“Hey, peace be with you,” the woman said with a drowsy grin.

I grabbed Ginny and headed back toward the stairs. She sniffled and waved goodbye to the woman as we ascended the steps. The woman didn’t seem to see her.

“OK,” I said when we had made our way back outside. “We need to hurry home and tell Mom and Dad.”

Ginny’s eyes widened. “I thought we weren’t going to tattle!”

“I just said that so she wouldn’t try to hurt us. Drug users are dangerous. Come on, let’s go.”

We hadn’t gotten far when we ran into the pirates again. They seemed to have gotten rowdier and increased in numbers since the last time we saw them. At the front of the pack, one of the pirates was jabbing a captive in the back with a plastic cutlass while the rest of the group shouted, “Walk the plank! Walk the plank!”

The captive was a scrawny boy dressed as a werewolf. He was tied up with bungee cords and looked like he had been crying. Being older than these kids, I decided to intervene.

“What are you doing to that werewolf?” I asked. “You need to let him go.”

“He’s our prisoner!” shouted one of the pirates. “We’re going to make him walk the plank!”

“Yeah!” joined in a few of the other pirates.

“Go home, you little twerps,” I told them. I grabbed the werewolf and pulled him away from his captors. This was met with howls of outrage.

“He’s trying to take our prisoner!” shouted one.

“Get him!” screamed another.

The gang of pirates rushed me, plastic swords drawn. Suddenly I was being buffeted by small fists and plastic swords. Ginny yelled hysterically at them to stop, but I soon found myself on the ground being kicked all over my body with an occasional blow landing on my head. I felt on the verge unconsciousness when someone shouted, “Zombie!” and the kicks all stopped at once. I heard the footsteps of the pirates as they all ran in unison and I felt a wave of relief wash over me. Zombie or not, at least I was finally safe from that vicious gang of preteen pirates.

“Oh hi, Princess Leia!” I heard Ginny say above me.

I pushed myself up off the ground slowly, feeling battered and broken. Blood trickled out of my nose and onto the pavement below. I had lost a few fights before, but never had I been beaten up as badly as I was by those miniature marauders. The woman from the basement of the abandoned house was standing a few feet away and shaking her head.

“It’s a sad state of affairs when pirates are allowed to roam the streets, beating the tar out of innocent children,” she said grimly.

“What are you doing here, Princess?” Ginny asked. “Did you come out here to save my big brother?”

The woman looked confusedly at Ginny. “I’m out of medicine. Time to move on. Ain’t nowhere to buy it in this neighborhood that I can find.”

With that, the woman patted Ginny on the head and walked off down the street. Ginny waved stiffly at her and then turned her attention toward the boy in the werewolf costume, who was still tied up and had not yet spoken a word.

“Are you OK?” she asked him.

He nodded mutely and then pointed at me.

“That’s my big brother,” Ginny said. “He knows Kung Fu.”

I untied the boy. He nodded in thanks and then walked off.

“Let’s go home,” I said to Ginny, wincing a bit as I started to walk.

She smiled, took my hand, and led the way as I limped along beside her.

First, I would like to tell you that I applaud your recent efforts to improve yourself and your life. You have been shopping for a new house, and have signed up for 7-day VIP trial memberships to Gold’s Gym more than once. Most recently, you have joined SpeedDate.com and — guess what! — they have already located several matches for you.

I am less certain that your recent Redbox rentals, Game of Death, Unstoppable, and S.W.A.T. Firefight are likely to improve your life in any appreciable way. You might find your time is better spent watching romantic comedies to study Hugh Grant’s unmatched ability to charm the ladies.

But before any of that, I would suggest that you learn your own email address. Perhaps you are sitting at home right now wondering why Leanne of Perry hasn’t responded to your “wink” yet. Well, you know what? She has. But you will never know about it, because all your email comes to me.

If you happen to know Emma Lawton of Wellington, New Zealand or Ellen Lawton, who recently stayed at the Doubletree Suites in Bentonville, Arkansas, please give them the same message.

Yours in elawtonness,

Emily Lawton

Dear State of Alaska,

What’s up with all your dry cities? What exactly do you expect your citizens to do during the long, cold winter months? I’ve heard people are drinking mouthwash up there. Please reconsider.

Much love,

Emily Lawton