In truth, Thanksgiving started at 8:27 pm, Wednesday evening, with a call to my cell from a payphone in Trenton. I keep my cell in my back pocket and I have a beefy ass. I didn’t hear it the first two times it rang. I did hear it on the third ring, at 8:36.

“I went to New York today.”

“Then why are you calling from New Jersey?” The number had come through on caller-ID and I had looked up the area code after missing the first two calls.

“Funny story. I’ll tell you later. I’m not calling because I need you to get me. I’m just bored.”

“Why did you go to New York?”

“A conference. It was fun. Now I’m just waiting for the train. Could you do me a favor? I need to know when the next one leaves for Wilmington.”

I looked it up. “About half an hour ago. Do you need me to get you?”

“I’ll see if the shuttle is running. I’ll call if I need you.”

I waited an hour then went to bed. The bird was set to go on at 2am. It was my first time and Dad was going wake me up in the middle of the night to walk me through the family recipe. I had asked him to.

I was down for 2 ½ hours. The phone rang at midnight.

“I took the shuttle to Norristown. The morning train runs in a few hours. I’ll wait at the McDick’s. I talked to the Indian guy that runs the place and he’s cool with it.”

The McDonald’s on Markley. The same one that was held-up last week. It had been in the paper.

I pulled up to the curb at 12:30.

“One guy offered to give me a ride. Another tried chatting me up. Another one offered me $40. That would be giving it away.”

I agreed. No less than $100, on sale. We hit the highway, headed for Wilmington. The conversation was nice. I was already on the road and it was wet and being upset now wouldn’t do any good.

We were there, she was through the door, and I was going north again by 1:30. There was no chance of getting back on time, but I wouldn’t be more than a few minutes late.
I came up to the onramp.

I’d never been through a sobriety checkpoint before. The cop asked me two questions that took less than a minute, but the ramp was backed up for a quarter mile.

“Fuck me. It’s still frozen.” I was 20 minutes behind, but Dad was still wrist-deep in the turkey when I came in. The first thing was to get the bird thawed.

I have a problem with drains. Not a phobia; a disgust. There are other things I’d rather do than get close to one. Like my taxes. The lower to the ground, the worse it gets. Floor drains and tub drains are not even safe to look at. The drains by a pool or in a locker room, mounted by a wad of bubble gum, corroded and hairy, perhaps with the cover of a safety razor stuck in the grill; these are the worst. Laundry basins and bathroom sinks are not as bad, but not much better. Of all the types, kitchen sink drains are almost the least offensive. With them, I only have to hold my fingers under hot water for a minute or two.

Unfortunately, the most efficient way to quick-thaw a turkey is a warm-water bath. There is no consideration for his sensitive son’s issues. Fuck that—and he’s right. No dispensation for pussies.

But my food was still touching the drain. It was being manhandled by maniacs, grappled and mauled and hosed down. Every single part of it rubbed against the bottom of the sink. If I had not known that it would be purified in fire, if I could not be sure, if I wasn’t going to do it personally, I would have had the ham.

By the end, I was falling asleep standing up.

Anne was over and everyone downstairs was talking too loudly and I’d left my bedroom door open and I’d only gotten five hours of sleep and I wasn’t going to be able to shut my eyes again.

“Etta’s in the hospital.”

It wasn’t yet noon and the dinner table was set with all the fine china and the white table cloth and the yellow napkins Mom had spent half an hour ironing last night.

“Jean said she was having trouble breathing. They’ve admitted her and they’re going to intubate.”

The table was set beautifully. I’d slept through the parade, of course. I haven’t seen the Spider-Man float since I was 11.

Dinner was held at 3, then Dad and I were on our way to the hospital. Jean had been with her all day. Every few minutes, she had to gently push Etta back down onto the bed. Etta was trying to cough up the intubation tube. Eventually, the nurses had to restrain her.

I can feel the family’s cruelty. It is a disease of selfishness that lies dormant most of the time. It only erupts like a boil on the neck when enough of us come together for something like Thanksgiving dinner. Or it could come when someone is sick. We milk our concerns for our sister or aunt or mother, and then we turn and curse one another and blame one another and tell anyone who’ll listen how no-good all of ‘them’ are. I can feel it, and I spread it all the same as any of us. Today, I hated Etta’s worthless daughters; one for being a junkie and a convict, the other for being an ingrate who could not come to see her mother until her dinner guests had left. They disgust me more than the kitchen drain.

But her daughters are what she made them.

We sat by Etta’s bedside for a few hours until her unincarcerated daughter showed up. Then Mom and Dad and Jean and I went home for coffee.

My phone buzzed on the table. I pressed the ‘silence’ button and returned to the conversation and a piece of cherry pie.

Another buzz.

“Someone’s trying to get a hold of you.”

“Thanks. I heard.” I silenced it again. I wanted to at least get a start on my pie before going to another room to answer it. I usually went outside, but it was still raining.

Buzz. I couldn’t ignore it again since no one else was. I tried to get up, but my shoe caught for a moment between the table leg and the chair.

“Thanks for taking me home.” I went into the bathroom and shut the door. She sounded less confident than last night when she said she’d wait all night alone. She was quieter.

“How was Thanksgiving?” I was hoping for ‘good’.

“Uneventful. A fight with my mom.” I sat on the closed toilet lid. This would take a while.

Skip to the punch line; “Tell me that you don’t care.”

“I don’t care.”

“Do you mean it?” “It’s been a long day.” I didn’t want to tell her why it had been a long day, that it hadn’t been just her. I didn’t want to commit myself to participate any more than I already had by picking up.

“Do you mean it?” She liked to hit me with the hard ones when I was tired.

I told her to have a good night and I’d talk to her soon.

I went downstairs and Jean had the eggnog out. I wanted a few belts, but I never had a taste for liquor and I was done with it before I had the first glass down. Jean cleaned up the rest.

“Did you see the parade?”

She told me she hadn’t. She’d wanted to, but she was already headed for the hospital by the time it started.

“Of course, we had our own little parade here, didn’t we?” She smiled at me and it felt like she’d been sitting there beside me since the first phone call the night before. It felt nice to imagine that she knew everything.

“I guess we did.”

I decided to give the eggnog another try as Mom walked into the kitchen to bag up what was left of the turkey. My phone buzzed in my back pocket, but I ignored it.

I also remember that summer, because it was the summer that I became a dinosaur. I would hide in the sheds and garages of my neighbors, and jump out with a great big roarwhen they opened the doors. For a moment, things would be pretty tense. Then, they’d recognize me from my mustache and we’d both have a good laugh. My neighbors would forget whatever chores they had set off to begin and we’d all sit together on the back porch drinking High Life and watching the fireflies fill the night with their shameless flirtations.

It was on one such night that I met Eric. At first, I thought he looked delicious, and that I would eat him. Then I noticed his hairlip and felt momentarily sorry. I took himto my extra secret hiding place. We lay in the dark for what seemed like an hour, but was actually an hour and a half. We talked mostly of pasta. He said his favorite was tortellini, which I said didn’t really count as a pasta. Then he said I was drunk. Maybe I was.

Yes, it was shaping up to be a truly amazing summer. Then Julie wrecked her Pontiac. After that, I didn’t much feel like stuffing myself into dusty, dirt floor sheds. Not to mention the spiders. No, things were different after that. But we kept our mustaches.

Before me, Mr. X had a super-intelligent orangutan named Hopewell. He turned super-intelligent after eating a radioactive Pez. A black and white photograph of Hopewell hangs outside Mr. X’s office. The print was poorly treated, so the shadows have turned gold. Hopewell stands on a street of featureless white buildings. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and grips a Kalashnikov.  Mr. X says Hopewell was the only person who could make him laugh.
 

I started in the circus, performing as “The Indestructible Boy.”  My act was simple and humiliating.  First , I swam through a tub of sulfuric acid—breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly.  The chemicals dissolved my swim-trunks, which meant I had to climb out naked. Next I back flipped into a cage of wolves.  The wolves looked travel-worn, but could lob me seven or eight feet after giving my torso a hopeless shake. I enjoyed the dogs, but I hated the finale. My manager forced a slender German hand grenade down my throat. I could have withstood the explosion with my mouth shut, but the audiences wanted to see, so I had to gape at the canopy until the fire came.

Outside the show I was ignored. The circus folks couldn’t relate to an invincible boy. Every showman had a busted joint, if not a missing limb.
 

I thought Mr. X was a new act the first I saw him. He wore black, and sat cross-legged in the administrative tent. My manager officially began our meeting by pulling a revolver from his desk and firing at my heart.  The force knocked me over my chair, and back near the entrance flap. My manager offered the revolver to Mr. X, but he pooh-poohed the weapon and came over to me.

Some ash fell as he looked down at my splayed form. His face showed no compassion, but his cheek twitched with concern. Like a mangy circus wolf, my heart jumped for that morsel.
 

Mr. X’s cigarette dangled from his lip as he felt my neck, listened to my chest, and tested my reflexes. His touch was gentle and methodic, but touch had been so rare that his hands delighted me as if they were a pair of fledglings flapping against my skin.

“Humans love panic. If a meteor isn’t hurdling towards them,  they’ll invent gigantic lizards to level their own cities,” Mr. X explained.

He produced a syringe and prepared to draw blood.

“Although it sounds nice, saving the world is mostly ceremony, a futile—”   The needle snapped as he pressed it against my arm.

“Well you’re a tough one,” Mr. X said curtly.

“Nothing can hurt me,” I muttered.

“You have blood don’t you—spinal fluid, lymph nodes?”

I shrugged.

Mr. X leaned back to ash his cigarette and gave a shallow sigh.
 

These days it’s just me, Mr. X, and the reanimated woman, but I don’t see the reanimated woman very much because she scares easily.  Mr. X stays in his office most days, takes his food through a doggy door, and sleeps in a hammock above his desk. His only telephone is red and the president uses it to call for help.  I pop in now and again to ask a question about alien warfare, or parapsychology. There is a mutual understanding that he owes me these intrusions.  He rarely builds fantastic machines any more, instead he reads the paper and complains like any other old person.

I fill my days will exercise, completing countless push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups. At least twice a day I jog through all as twelve of the subbasements. My footsteps echo in the cavernous halls—a sound metallic and malevolent. I race against the alien skeletons, mystical artifacts, and once-advanced technologies that crowd the walls, but more specimens always wait around the corner. They are always ahead of me. 
 

Sometimes the reanimated woman asks me to make a big breakfast, and then force us all to sit down together.  We never have much to talk about, and Mr. X often ends up sprinkling sugar onto the table and contemplating the crystals under a magnifying glass.

“Do you know what human beings need—”

The reanimated woman usually cuts him off with a song, something cheerful.  Only she can never remember the words, and her voice gets frantic when she realizes how much she has forgotten.
 

A few days ago, the president called about a giant worm that had devoured a subway train.  I wore the wrong shoes, so as Mr. X and I scaled down the monster’s pit, loose shale scuffed up my sneakers. I aimed my flashlight straight into the void and the darkness seemed to push against the light.

Mr. X subdued the worm with a device he didn’t bother explaining to me. It looked like a metal lunch pale with a cocktail umbrella spinning on top.  I headed along the worm’s flank, which was glistening maroon, and higher than a freight ship’s hull.  I took out my pocket-knife, picked an arbitrary point, and slipped in the blade. The flesh was so thick I had to saw. When the wound was big enough, I zipped up my track-suit against the cold and climbed inside.

In the pit, my elbows had scraped geological earth, hard, crumbling, and mineral; in the worm, my hands sank into psychological earth, soft, cold, nocturnal— a place where the dead floated like fish. This was Mr. X talking. I never used to think this way.

I crawled over hills of digested dirt. I stumbled upon a pig corpse, a bicycle, and a carnival booth, before I finally found the lightless train cars. I remembered why I was there, and knew that one of two things had happened. Either I had reached the passengers in time, or I hadn’t.
 

Mr. X has studied dreams. He has used science galaxies-ahead of that known to other humans, and uncovered the true nature of sleep. He calls it a migration, because just as worms burrow down to the heat of the earth, dreams wriggle down to animals during sleep.  Each dream is drawn to the one mind that can sustain it. 

The dreams that reach me are all fire and water. On the coast, the houses burn. The people run from doors, clutching belongings, but the fire chases them. Like a dog, the flames snap at their ankles. On the sea, the water churns. Hundreds of boats are sinking, but thousands have already sunk. I move freely over the wreckage, bound along the shore, and walk across the waves. I try to save the victims, but their bodies are oiled—the harder I hold them, the faster they slip from my grasp.

I am sure it is a message, sent by a world in peril.  But I haven’t told Mr. X.  I don’t want him to know I keep failing.  
 

I swept my flashlight over the subway train, and in a dark pool of window, found a boy staring out.  He squinted in the light. Then a man rose out of the darkness and lifted the child up. Alive.

A straight face is critical when saving someone. I used to smile, but no one wants a smile when a death-ray has just evaporated their home. As the survivors struggled out of the train car, I stared ahead somberly. The flashlight grazed each face, just enough for me to see the eyes, to remember them if the dream returned.

A woman tripped as we climbed over the soft dirt, and my jacket jerked against my neck as she gripped me.  She gave an apologetic look as she steadied herself. For a second I held her bare wrist. 

Outside, we found Mr. X blowing smoke-ring. He waved us past aloofly as the giant worm shifted, and rocks rained around us. He removed his cigarette, squinted at a dial, and cursed softly.
 
      Mr. X’s proposal for man sits on a shelf under the cookie-tin where the reanimated woman saves envelopes.  The proposal is forty-seven pages with illustrations.  The proposals main idea is sixty-four white cubes, arranged in grid—though the paper itself has turned yellow.  I didn’t understand the sixty-four cubes at first, and that irked Mr. X. What could be more obvious? But he was willing to explain.

“Pan back over all the scenes of your life.  What was most important?”

I thought of a stranger’s hand grazing my own in a crowd, but Mr. X answered for me.

“Life itself. The abstract flow of existence. That is primary.”

He paused for effect and leaned back.

“And if you were a scientist—a chemist—what atoms would you say composed the molecule of life?”

I was about to answer.

“Water. Air. Food. Community. Shelter.”

He made five black dots on a piece of paper.

“Do you know why crystals are so pure?”

I was still thinking about hands.   “No, they probably don’t teach that in the circus. In a crystal the molecules are strictly organized. Each stabilizes its neighbor.”

He drew lines between the dots.

“I propose we arrange the life of each human, so that it stabilizes the life of his fellow. We crystallize humanity into life modules.”

I stared blankly at the doughy flesh of Mr. X’s ear.

“We live in cubes.”  
 

Some nights I pretend I am on guard duty. Once I found a gardener snake that had managed to get past our bomb-proof security door. I took the elevator out of the subbasements and released him on the grass. Recently, I heard rummaging in the kitchen, and found the reanimated woman standing at the refrigerator.  She opened the door slightly, reached a hand in, withdrew the hand, and shut the door. Then she opened the door again, and repeated.

“What do you want Ophelia?”

“Juice, but it’s in the back.”

She had this fear that the food would spoil if she held the door open for more than a second.

“It’s safe,” I said, jerking the door wide.  Cold light poured out and touched my hand. I counted to ten to prove my point, then handed her the juice.

“I know,” she said, “but what if I let go of the door, and forget it’s open. Then what would we eat?”

She cradled the juice bottle, unsure for a moment if she had finished speaking, then she turned, and wandered out into the laboratory’s depths.  
 

I barged into Mr. X’s office, ready to tell him my dream about water and fire.  He had studied dreams, and he could scientifically decode the message.

“Damn it,” said Mr. X, clutching his hand.

He had been cleaning the grit off a rocket scooter from the second world war. The sharp tool he was using had skipped and punctured his palm.

“Sorry,” I said, and turned away.

“Where are you going?” He snapped. “I’m going to teach you something.”

He handed me a rag, and open his hand to expose a black pool.

“This is blood. The ancients believed blood was the soul itself.  Then physicians said it was one of four humors, which must be balanced—apply pressure.”

I pressed lightly on the rag, afraid I would break a bone. But he pressed my thumbs down harder with his healthy hand.

“Blood corresponded to fire.  But for a modern, blood could also mean water, the black water of the unconscious, blue channels beneath the skin. Burning water, this is a contradiction, but humanity is a contradiction. Are you listening?”

I pressed harder than I intended.  I wanted him to ask me to stop.

“A dream keeps coming to me. The people bleed, I can’t help them,” I said.

“Why should you, of all people, be afraid of blood?”

“I think it’s a lost planet’s cry from help.”

Mr. X scoffed and reached for his cigarettes.

“You think I am stupid.”

“No, boy, I think you are innocent.”  
 

In the seventies, an African republic agreed to showcase Mr. X’s perfect city.  A grid of sixteen enormous cubes was construct under Mr. X’s supervision, and a hundred thousand citizens resided in the finished buildings.  Sociologists, architects, and reporters have written the rest.  Children formed gangs to fill their hours in the humorless concrete streets, mothers had to walk ungodly distances to reach the one grocery store, and no one could find a comfortable place for two people to sit and talk. Dissension spread, and the facility declined further. Mosquitoes breed in the broken air-ducts, and criminals fought for abandoned apartments.

Hopewell led a battalion of government soldiers into the grid to stabilize the situation, but the troops changed sides, and skewered the brilliant orangutan.  Mr. X says the soldiers killed Hopewell because they were scared of progress.  The society reached puberty, but wasn’t ready to grow-up. 

I say the people were promised a perfect city, and given a concrete box. They were sick of borders, sick of loneliness. So they crowded together in the tightest crowds the could. Limbs pressed on limbs, and sweat mixed with sweat.  Then wanted  out of the whole goddamn situation, and in the course of things they killed a monkey.

He was reading in the newspaper about politics and how they were doing.

Politics are doing well, he thought. Good. Politics are important.

He finished his meal. His mouth was smeared and amazed with it. He sipped his beer. He did not want it all. Someone else could finish that beer.

“Hello!” he said. “Hello! Will somebody finish my beer!”

Nobody finished his beer.

This man was a widower. At this restaurant the man would sit at this table with his old wife and read the paper, any section. If she were here now, he would not read the paper, and he would share his meal. But she could not be here now because she is dead.

“Here, have this!” he would say, lifting forkfuls.

What happened in the paper did not really concern him.

Maybe he would still read the paper if his old wife were here. He held a great respect in him for this wife. Maybe they would read from separate papers to each other. Maybe papers from different cities.

He peered out the window of the restaurant. Everything was great outside. The weather was bright and inviting. The rolling clouds were poked with some holes. I want to climb inside of there, he thought.

He came outside. This man tucked the paper in his armpit. Sharp wind tried to blow it away.

He walked around the downtown. He remembered going to these different places to get certain things with his wife and his girlfriend. He didn’t get things with both his wife and his girlfriend together, but at different times in the day. As he passed each place, it was a different memory. This way was the way he saw places now. There were places for his girlfriend, and places for his old wife. In truth he had not seen so many different places recently. Each place was mostly the same. There were, of course, different races and ethnicities, but not much else beyond that.

This man could feel his father and his mother thumping in his breast. His father had a different life than him. For instance, his father never did read the paper. For instance, he had many books in the house, and he did not touch his children to play, and he was by his wife when she stopped doing her living.

But these two were crowded out by his old wife in his breast, beating. She beat, wagged through the swale of his heart, and then he bought a coke from a vending machine in the park by the movie theater.

He found a bench without anybody in the park near the movie theater. It was a nice, grassy park with plenty of vending machines and honey acacia shrubs. He lay there for a short while and died. Nearby, a group of children played football. One was the worst football player among them. It was tackle football and he was slow, and he struggled. He was never getting the ball but still he was the object of so many tackles. He did not speak to any of the other children. He flopped around. After one tackle he lay on the ground and whimpered and did not move for many minutes. The children yelled at him to move. Still he would not move. The other children became scared. Someone said he would call the parents of the child who was not moving. The child stirred, knelt, and rose to his feet. He said something, and kept going with the football game.

We set out after the wedding to drive cross-country: just me, Trent, and Trent’s new car. She’s the color of merlot, with white upholstery, and so sleek and fast that he named her “Flo.” When we were a hundred miles from home, reaching the outskirts of Asheville, Trent trailed the fingers of his right hand down my arm, never taking his eyes off the road, and said, “You know, Lisa, love smells a little like a new BMW.”

I was so happy. I said I’d never thought about it, but maybe he was right.

Day Two:

Eating in the car is not allowed, so we’ve been stopping at bumpkin restaurants. To Trent, every little hamlet we drive through is Bumpkinville. Bumpkin children get on and off bumpkin school buses. He doesn’t say this about the service stations where he fills Flo’s gas tank, though. I think he believes the car can hear him.

He orders barbeque everywhere we stop, even for breakfast. “This is the life,” he keeps saying as he revs the engine.

Day Three:

When there are no bumpkin restaurants, we stop at roadside rest areas. We bought a cooler and a red and white checkered tablecloth that is too small for the concrete picnic tables, leaving bare strips of gray on either side. Today, a hard breeze whipped up the tablecloth’s edges and blew loose tendrils of hair across my face. Trent said, “You look so beautiful. Let me take your picture.”

I was wearing a white sleeveless blouse, and blue capris. I arranged myself on top of the table. Trent snapped a couple of pictures with his digital camera, and then he said, “Let’s take a few of you and Flo.”

He took six shots in all. Back in the car, I looked them over. I was small in the shots with Flo. In every single pose, a yellow butterfly perched on my left shoulder, holding tight despite the wind. I looked down to see if it might still be there, but there was only a sprinkling of yellow powder on the white fabric of my blouse. I passed the camera to Trent at a stop light. “Can you believe it?” I asked him.

“That is the color of happiness,” I said.

Day Four:

The little townlets we pass look like those folksy paintings where everything resembles a patchwork quilt. I stared out at them, imagining the people who might live in each house, while Trent complained that Flo didn’t smell as new as she had a few days ago. I reminded him she can’t smell new forever. After a while, I curled up in the back seat. I was dreaming of the yellow butterfly when Trent woke me, saying, “Lisa, honey, would you mind slipping your shoes back on?” He said it apologetically, and although he stopped and bought no-smell foot powder at the next store we came to, I couldn’t help thinking that hurt feelings smelled a little like new BMW, too.

Day Five:

A butterfly collided with Flo’s windshield today. Its squished body adhered to the glass, and its wings fluttered crazily, no longer in synchrony. Trent stopped the car and got out. He held a white handkerchief in his left hand, and picked the butterfly’s body off the glass gently, pinching its yellow wing between his right thumb and forefinger. I watched him from the front seat, feeling tender towards him, until he tossed the tiny corpse into the weeds without even looking in that direction. He squirted glass cleaner on the remaining goo and wiped it with the handkerchief.

I couldn’t find the body in the weeds, and I didn’t talk to him for the next hour and a half. He said, “What did you expect me to do, dig a grave for it?”

Day Six:

There’s a smell in the car which we can’t explain—musty, like the upholstery has gotten damp. This morning, Trent kept sneaking looks at me as if he suspected I’d spilled something. I told him to smell the handkerchief he used to wipe the butterfly’s remains from the window, because it might still smell of thoughtlessness.

After we ate lunch, he gave me a hug, and said, “I’m sorry,” but I thought I heard him sniffing my hair.

Day Seven:

The smell is worse. It’s like that time my family went away on a camping trip and came home to find the electricity had been out for three days. When we opened the fridge, there was a stink of moldering broccoli and soured milk. Trent tossed out the handkerchief this morning, and we’ve been driving with the windows down. He keeps muttering to himself, saying that he can’t believe this is happening, and that he doesn’t understand, but I think I do.

Flo is on my side.

Now that it’s snowing in most of the United States, we figured it was finally time to post a photograph of our new-ish (as of this summer) logo-emblazoned t-shirts:

Available now, and in finer weather to come, from our online shop.

J.A.

Again, Maria protested. “I’ll concede the point but, it’s, it’s just not proper.”

“Frank’s my husband,” Luz stated with the rolling voice of an orator, “and I officially grant you permission to show him your scandalous tits.”

“Please don’t, don’t,” Maria implored as Luz gripped an aluminum stanchion and pulled herself up.

Luz turned. “The clock’s ticking and our world’s finished in like three hours, little sister. I’m going to skinny-dip one last time before the fireball sweeps things clean and I hope you’ve got the nerve to join me.” Maria took a deep breath, then nodded.

Luz unceremoniously stripped off her green bikini, stepped back for a running start, and cannonballed into the cool lake. The splash diverted Gene and Francis’s attention from their slingshot. They noted Luz’s absence, and Maria looking worriedly at the momentary dimple in the water’s surface. “Maria’s gone skinny-dipping,” she told them, “I’m sorry.” The men looked at each other; both shrugged their shoulders.

Luz resurfaced off the starboard side of the boat. The men and Maria observed as her face broke through the water, then her chest, then her steadily kicking legs. She floated on her back, grinning up at her audience.

“My wife’s skinny-dipping, Gene, and she is a fiery and fine-looking woman” Francis observed.

“So she is, Frank,” Gene agreed quietly, then, noting that Maria was privy to their conversation, continued with added volume, “just like my wife, who shouldn’t be so modest and should join her sister for one last swim.” Gene smiled at Maria, whose face flushed red as she turned away from the men.

Gene returned to the project at hand. “Back to work?”

“Let’s get this tubing sorted and then I think we’ll be ready for our first test launch.”

Francis switched on the radio and began finessing the slingshot’s tendons as Gene scribbled projectile trajectories on a paper towel. Three hours until the shock wave would speed its way around the world to dear old South Carolina, the announcer informed them. He reminded them that he’d be keeping them company until the fireball sped him off the air. Every time she heard the countdown, it hit Maria like a brick to the head. She stood akimbo, watching her impetuous sister glide through the peaceful water and considering the knots holding her own black bikini.

The brothers-in-law half-listened to the radio, contentedly finishing their beer-slinging contraption and shaking hands when they were satisfied.

“It is ready,” assessed Gene.

“It is ready, and it is good,” added Francis. At some time after their initial six-pack of test launches but before completion of the final adjustments, Maria had joined her sister naked in the lake. Neither of the men noticed when she’d lowered herself into the water, but they noticed now. Their wives were treading water a good twenty yards out, waving at them to send two cans of ammunition their way. The men launched eight, then swam out to meet them.

Maria gave Gene a kiss, clutched his hand, took a breath, then dove away beneath the surface as deep and fast as she could manage. When she touched bottom she righted herself and looked at her loved ones paddling above. It’d be happening any second now, she knew, and she wanted to hold on to every millisecond of life she could.

She felt the shock wave shaking through the water and saw the three of them fly away. It’s not fair, she told herself as the lake began evaporating away from her.

She nodded and said, “Get a real job.”

So he did.

But the strange thing is, ever since I took the new computer out of the box and booted it up for the first time, that same jewel-blue eye has been winking on and off, letting me know that the moment I ask to take a look inside, she’ll be staring back at me.

Contenders were limitless because all were once or more contenders. The desire to become This Particular Champion was in every one of us. Nothing could be done about it except challenge and compete, challenge and compete. Challenge and compete.

This Particular Champion is admired but hardly on a pedestal. When we see him in passing, we say, “Yo, TPC!” or “P-Champ, what’s up?” or “Good day, Steven.” Steven was the name of another Particular Champion - one from before that everybody battled and loved. When This Particular Champion talked about himself in the third person, as a Particular Champion is wont to do, even he sometimes calls himself Steven.

Fortunately, we place the majority of our thoughts on This Particular Champion. If we did not, we would likely notice how deeply we felt Steven’s loss. As it was, we delayed the process of challenges for maybe thirty minutes after we learned a new champion had been named in Steven’s place. It was an eternity referred to as The Era of Uncertainty.

The term of a Particular Champion has extended from a few days to a dozen or so years. There have been notable exceptions to this generality, namely during The Times of Great Burdens. In those hours we saw the turnover of two Particular Champions and the beginning reign of a third. The third was Steven — he remained for what seemed like moments but was closer to twenty years. That was perhaps too long a stretch. As he worked less to maintain the title, seeing that there remained little he had not faced, we backed off the more vigorous aspects of our challenges. Who of us wanted to become This Particular Champion by besting Steven, of all people? For Steven’s last five years, the title did not change hands due to goodwill and hero worship. When it did change it was a horrible thing to witness.

The lessened assaults upon the title left Steven nowhere near fighting shape. His skin, displayed in bare splendor according to tradition, was loose on his frame. The calluses on his once mighty hands and feet had sloughed off over time. Where we earlier chafed under Steven’s grasp, we of late welcomed his tender holds and arm bars. His eyes that pierced through a red sheen of bloodlust became cloaked behind a film of milky wetness. The war cries he once produced muffled, sounding like something loose and rattling in his diminishing chest. It was our inaction that caused the competition to occur as it did.

This Particular Champion, hungry for a turn at the top, saw well enough to concentrate on his training as Steven slid into complacency. In his remaining time he contributed to the voices urging a period of relaxation, as it had become distasteful to challenge a Particular Champion of Steven’s caliber. n that environment of complacency, he set upon Steven in ways not witnessed since the Round Robin Era.

When it was all over, Steven had been burned, beaten, and cut. He was shot and set to witness violence against his family. He was tortured to the point he asked for death and then released, only to be tortured again. He saw his monuments destroyed. His religion was mocked and his feelings were hurt. His flower garden was trampled and his high-shined dress shoes were scuffed. This Particular Champion went too far by half. We couldn’t celebrate the Exchanging of Titles anymore than could Steven’s prize Labradoodle, Mr. Sniffles, who could only mourn the hack job done unto him by the groomer in secret alliance with This Particular Champion. We wept, we argued, we became angry, and then we remembered who we were. We challenged.

Some stepped up immediately for a try at the title. But This Particular Champion was drunk with his new fame. He was still riding the high of his half-hour prior victory and the adrenalin and triumph coursing through his body would have measured off all possible charts, if we were a people of science or observation that created, maintained, and presented such things as charts. Others got into line and waited for their turn. They clutched their tickets and watched the LED readerboard. The rest trained. They saw the strengths of This Particular Champion and knew that, when their times came, he would still carry the title. They watched for weaknesses and adjusted strategies accordingly.

Several hours and two years passed. This Particular Champion has not changed in that period. He was opportunistic in the beginning but has proven resilient since. Some have thoughts of giving up. Some have thoughts of giving up as a tactic of sorts — to do as This Particular Champion did unto Steven. Others don’t wish to sink to that level. They feel that the title without the honor means nothing. But This Particular Champion means everything.

We have all, in our own ways, taken our turns. We have discharged firearms, thrown spears and large rocks, dug tiger traps, planted bombs, welded, created computer programs and simulations, knitted, and spoken words obscured by masks or the backs of hands. All but one, and his turn is coming in a week to a few more minutes to a month or two. We are all looking forward to some true entertainment. We will witness a classic battle as Steven makes his attempt at a comeback.

Depending on the outcome, Steven will be courageous or foolhardy. Either way, we will rejoice in the spectacle. Then we will again challenge. And compete. We will all want our shot at This Particular Champion. Every man, woman, and prize Labradoodle wants the one story we possess to be about them, if only for a time.

The ladies were sitting on towels talking about vowels as their children giggled and lost control of their bowels in chlorine-soaked diapers. That was the least of Shannon’s concerns — a dozen hungry bees were swarming the chocolate ice-cream cone melting into the sunbaked pavement below her lifeguard chair. It was an adult swim session so Shannon had to watch the pool like a hawk in case any of the elderly swimmers had a heart attack or went under.

She looked down at the bees, now challenged by a line of marching ants. Sky was cloudy, but no threatening signs of stormy weather. She gazed at the darkest cloud in the sky and examined closely for lightning…nothing. She prayed for thunder and watched the old ladies do the dead-man’s float. More timid swimmers held onto the sides of the pool and kicked slowly. One crazy man was racing the length of the pool, kicking like a maniac with the assistance of a yellow foam kickboard, his face blowing bubbles out from beneath the water like a wrinkled sea monster.

The bees were already agitated when the man splashed Shannon’s feet and ankles — kicking so hard beside the edge of the pool that he sprayed the wretched bastards and made them even more upset. The ants were eventually swept away by the small puddle the elderly man created each time he swam past the lifeguard chair.

“Shannon,” Hope shouted from across the pool. She was holding a half-empty water pistol and a Snapple bottle full of vodka; Shannon’s lunch break was about to begin.

“Damn you buggers…,” Shannon told them. She was stuck in the chair for a couple more minutes before she could blow the whistle, so she signaled for her girlfriend to come over to keep her company and clean up the mess.

“What’s up?” Hope asked Shannon when she made it over. Their faces sparkled like stars as they spoke.

“Oh, I see,” Hope said with a smile. She wanted to kiss Shannon — but this was a public place — actually a private club — but she could never show her affection publicly. Their mothers would have none of it; their fathers would send them to boarding school.

The bees seemed to be calming down as the chocolate melted into their wings and their eyes glazed over. Shannon grabbed the whistle from the Brine lacrosse string across her neck and blew it as hard as she could. The ladies shook their heads with disapproval and the old men frowned. A few of the littlest old ladies held their ears and squealed to each other in silent whispers like piglets rising from a mud puddle.

The eighty year old retired structural engineer, who went crazy for his kickboard forty-five minutes every morning, pulled himself out of the pool with his chest like a sea lion, as a beach ball bounced across the pool deck directly into his nose. He was stoic but complacent as the babies chased the inflatable ball from his face to the puddle of ice-cream that swallowed it with chocolate and halted its progress.

The bees were swarming around the children — when without warning Shannon dove from the lifeguard chair into the water. She resurfaced a moment later, flinging the drifting kickboard at the ice-cream like a nunchuck and screaming at the babies to “Jump-in-the-big-kids-pool!”

She caught three babies one by one and swam them to the other side like a crocodile crossing a river. The bees were stinging Shannon, digging their sticky tentacles into her French braided hair and their stingers into her head. She panicked a little but laughed it off and told herself to grow a set of testicles, and then she was confident and courageous — even catching some of them in anger with her clenched fist and squashing them as they stung her fingers and palm. Despite the crocodile tears, none of the children were injured.

“Time for my lunch break,” Shannon advised the head lifeguard after the mission was finished, pulling herself out of the pool with the grace of a drunken mermaid; “I think I’ve earned it.”

Diving practice had just begun and Shannon surprised herself by climbing the ladder to the high dive and doing a forward two-and-one-half somersault in pike position before running into the lifeguard shack for some medicine and disinfectant. She grabbed a couple bottles of bee medicine pretending it was Benzedrine and skipped away behind the locker rooms with a rousing ovation from the entire pool area for her valor.

“Thank you,” Shannon said. She bowed and slipped out of sight. The applause and whistles grew louder, forcing her to return a few moments later to offer an encore curtsey — an elegant gesture — especially considering she was wearing nothing more than a yellow bikini. Most mothers agreed that this event was even better than the festival and fireworks yet to come.

“Encore! Encore!”

The sun was shining and Shannon was smiling. A moment later she found Hope hiding in that tall grass behind the abandoned caddy shack. They caught each other in a wild embrace and collapsed in the weeds, their arms as tangled as the stems from the poison ivy that concealed them and comfortably brushed up against the backs of their necks and underneath their freshly shaven legs, while the hive unbeknownst above their heads was the mistletoe of the summer, as it has been every day since, growing into that edible mountain ash so fast it could easily break that branch and all would come crashing down.

“My clothes are gone. They have been stolen,” the naked woman said as she looked around Detective Tish’s office.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Detective Tish looked straight at the naked woman’s breasts. She sat down in front of Detective Tish’s desk and didn’t cross her legs. She took a cigarette out of who knows where and lit it. “Please find my clothes. You have to find my clothes.” The cigarette smoke curled up towards the florescent lights.

Detective Tish did not have to find her clothes. It was simple. He wanted to see this beautiful naked woman naked as long as possible. But the naked woman had come to him to find her clothes. If he found her clothes, she would not be naked anymore. Darn, Detective Tish thought, darn. His gaze dropped from the naked woman’s breasts down to the place between her legs. He started to scribble a striped sweater in the margin of his notepad. “Are you cold?”

The naked woman blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “No.”

It had been a long time since Detective Tish had sat in the passenger side of a moving car. He was always driving himself to his mother’s house, to the track, to the scene of a crime, alone. But he sat to the right of the naked woman in her car as they sped down a road. She was a reckless driver, tailgating and running over traffic cones whenever she saw one. And she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

“You should buckle up,” Detective Tish said as he tightened his grip on the door handle.

The naked woman reached behind her seat without taking her eyes off the road and grabbed a Jell-O cup. She ripped the top off while steering with her knees. “You want one?”

“What flavor is that?”

“Orange.”

“No thanks.”

“I don’t like how they leave marks on me.”

“But they could save your life. Especially the way you drive.” The naked woman didn’t have a spoon so she started to lick the orange Jell-O. “Where are we going?”

“To my place.”

“Okay.” Detective Tish liked the sound of that, but wished that he had been the one to suggest going to the naked woman’s place. Now she might think that he didn’t want to find her clothes, or worse, that he didn’t know how to find them.

When they arrived at the naked woman’s apartment, she opened the door and walked in. She dropped the key on the floor, walked over to a large window and sat on its sill, smoking another cigarette. Detective Tish looked around the apartment and saw that there wasn’t anything in it.

“Do you have a chair? I want to ask you some questions about what happened to your clothes.”

“You’re the detective. There’s a chair in the kitchen.” Detective Tish walked into the kitchen and walked out with a small wooden chair. He placed it near the window, sat down and pulled out his notepad.

“Where did you keep your clothes? Before they were stolen?

The naked woman took a drag on her cigarette and noticed something through the window. “It was probably my ex-husband.”

“What makes you think that?”

“We divorced about a year ago. When we first met, he gave my clothes more compliments than he gave me, and on our first date, he gave me a bunch of hay instead of flowers.”

Detective Tish crossed out a note he had written on his notepad. “He gave you a bunch of hay on your first date?”

The naked woman finished her cigarette, opened the window and tossed the butt out onto the street below. She leaned out and breathed in the fresh air. It was cold outside and Detective Tish was getting cold. He could hear men yelling and cars honking. The naked woman leaned further out of the window, so far that Detective Tish thought she might fall out, but she popped her head back inside. “I remember it like it was yesterday. He took me to a farm. He talked about the animals and the dress I was wearing. He said I was wearing a nice dress.” The naked woman closed the window and sat back down on the sill. “A pig caught his eye and he wondered what it would look like in a polka dot bikini. It was very sweet.”

“The thought of a pig in a polka dot bikini was sweet, or was the moment sweet?”

“All of it. It was all so sweet. We got married and moved into a nice house. I remember seeing a goat strut by our kitchen window wearing a nice evening gown with him chasing after, or a bunch of chickens posing in a coop wearing striped bikinis and it would make me smile. It made him so happy. He would fall asleep at night smiling brightly telling me that he felt like a kid who takes his mother’s clothes and puts them on animals that aren’t meant to wear panty hose.”

“Why did you divorce him?”

The naked woman’s gaze went back to something out on the street below. “He changed. His thoughts of dressing farm animals in women’s clothing, they became a little too… intense.” Detective Tish had been taking notes, but he was now drawing a pig wearing a bikini. “He stopped going to work, he stopped eating and he stopped showering. He stayed up all hours of the night thinking about what outfit to put on which animal. I tried to be supportive, I even tried to understand what he was doing. He held a fashion show in our backyard.” The naked woman started to cry. “He made a catwalk in the middle of our backyard and set up lights and he pumped in loud music and he ran around in his bathrobe taking picture of all the animals he had dressed up. He even had cardboard cutouts of photographers and people in the crowd.”

Detective Tish didn’t want to find the naked woman’s clothes but he did want to meet a man who chases after a goat wearing an evening dress. He got up from his chair to hand the naked woman his handkerchief and saw what she saw out of the window. A piano had fallen from an apartment above and landed on a hot dog cart on the street below. The hot dog vendor was looking up at Detective Tish, like he was the one who destroyed his hot dog cart.

“Dear Cormac, a little punctuation goes a long way. Try using commas and quotation marks. I thought your vision was a tad bleak. Can you lighten it up a little?”

“Dear Scott, I thought the character of Gatsby needed to be introduced earlier in the narrative. I don’t quite get a feel for him. For starters, what does he look like? Tom Buchanan’s character needs work.”

“Dear Pappa, I thought the rhythm of your sentences was repetitive and monotonous. Try varying your sentence structure and using periods. Also, I thought your female characters lacked depth.”

“Dear Mark, you have a great ear for dialogue and vernacular. However, I thought you were excessive in your use of the N-word. Furthermore your portrayal of Jim was racist and stereotypical.”

“Dear Herman, I thought the metaphor of the white whale was a bit obvious, don’t you? The book was too long for my tastes. I’d trim it by a few hundred pages if I were you.”

“Dear TS, you lost me at The.”

We upgraded the software that runs Johnny America a few months ago, and in the process broke several items. We got the commenting system up-and-running quickly (we think so, anyway — there haven’t been many comments, lately…) but there were a couple of functions and sub-pages temporarily disabled. What was busted, is mended.

Once again you can visit the Moon Rabbit Drinking Club & Benevolence Society’s one “investment” — the parked web domain enlargercream.com.

More importantly, the Search page is working again.

J.A.