2 jigger gin (re: pour about a knuckle high in this glass)
1 jigger creme de violet (re: add it until I like the shade)
TONIC.
A dash of lime juice (which erases many cocktail sins)
A little more creme de violet, (because I wanted it to be darker)

Aw yeah. Hella tight.

Oh, btw, I’ll be posting more often now.

Okay, SO.

I have managed to somehow finagle two friends into run/walking the Pittsburgh Jingle Bell 5K with me on December 8th. It’s also a fundraiser for arthritis, by which I mean I guess we’re raising money to cure it, and not to cause more if it.  Unlike widows and orphans, no one need more arthritis, Morticia.

Anyway, I figured that it can’t hurt to ask you all for donations. I don’t have bad arthritis, but I know people whose lives would be made better if we had super awesome ways to cure it, you know, with SCIENCE!

Reblogged from Margaret and Helen:

• 

HELEN:

Margaret, I ventured into new territory today. I tuned into Fox News. It was kind of like going to the zoo... not so scary once you learn the animals can't get out of their cages.

Just like when I go to a regular zoo, I didn't know the names of all the animals at Fox, but I quickly learned the ones with opposable thumbs and the ability to reason were token Democrats who had, at some point, worked in the Clinton administration.

Read more… 687 more words

Rollback

Perhaps you’ve been focusing too much on saving.
(LEARN CHINESE – Egg roll. Chūn juǎn)

The plaque on the far wall directly in my eyesight each and every day says, EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH: ALICE SHAND, accompanied by a girl’s blond-haired, blue-eyed visage staring sullenly at the camera. It’s not me. I’ve only been working here for three months.

Alice has been dead for seven. Still, employee of the month.

“This coupon is expired,” I say to the lady.

“It can’t be. I just got it out of the Daily Mailer.”

“You might have, if it was 2006,” I tell her, then point to the date.

Her eyes center on the print, which even I have to admit I have had a hard time reading. “That says 2008.”

I toss the coupon in to the trash bin under the counter. “And yet three years too late for this discount on kitty litter.”

Behind the lady at the next check out lane Dorsey rolls his eyes at me and makes an obscene gesture in plain view of the several cameras that are aimed at us. Sometimes I wonder how people can forget that they’re constantly being recorded. How do you forget? Every afternoon on my break I go into the security booth and Randy plays the latest in America’s Dumbest Shoplifters for me.

I can never forget I’m on camera. It feels like ants on my scalp.

#

“You have to stop picking at that.”

I stop scratching at my head, which is more habit than anything else. I’m not even on camera. From here, I can see almost the whole store—every aisle, every checkout lane. The front entrance in black and white, the grainy darkness that is the empty loading dock at night.

“Show me the thing again,” I ask Randy over his shoulder, his hair brushing my cheek. Randy smells like Axe Body Spray and Lysol. His eyes run over the fifteen screens in a pattern that he uses, he says, because it’s quickest. He says that he finds himself watching TV that way at home, too—glance at the top corner of the screen and move in a concentric circle. Makes football funny. I think they taught him that at security guard school, or wherever security guards learn to security…guard.

“In a minute. Check this one from last week,” Randy says, cueing the tape. We watch a man in the health and beauty section stand in front of the topical analgesics. “Let’s read the back of the Preparation H, up no, not what I want.” Randy finishes his Red Bull and tosses the can in the trash instead of the blue recycling bin because it’s closer. “Now I’ll look at the arthritis stuff. Hrm.”

“Fast forward,” I say, leaning over his arm to press the button.

Randy slaps my hand, and yanks on the Twizzler in my mouth. “No look, dumbass.”

The man glances about, picks up a container of Mineral Ice, a counter-irritant. I know because I use it on my knees. It doesn’t cure pain, but it hurts more than the fucking knees and that’s distracting.

The man opens the jar and smells it. Then he looks around (they never remember the camera), then dips his fingers in. He firks out a huge dollop, replaces the cap and jar, then right there, sticks his hand down the front of his trousers, and quite obviously—

“Is that?”

“Yeah,” Randy says, “He put that shit on his junk. It gets better.”

He’s had his hands down his shorts for about fifteen seconds when his body stiffens and his mouth opens in a shocked O. Then he starts to run. More like a limp, like a hobble, he staggers down the aisle into one of the larger cross aisles, his hand still in his pants. He goes about three aisles before he runs into someone, classically, a woman about eighty-nine with a walker. She goes down, and he falls backwards.

I’m not sure when real life slapstick turns into tragedy. On America’s Funniest Home Videos they used to show all these clips of little kids accidentally hitting their dads or uncles in the jibblies. I just think that if those kids were whacking their mum’s in the twat or in the boobs, it wouldn’t be on TV.

On the other hand, when the man tries to get up with his hand still in his pants, and he tumbles backwards into a giant display of 5000 Flushes, I have to admit, this is fucking funny.

“Shecky caught him in the bathroom with his pants down and his dick under the spigot. He was on the fucking sink, and when Shecky went to pull him off, the whole thing came out of the wall.”

I watch the man disappear into the bathroom, and then a minute later Shecky runs on screen and follows him. Randy turns the tape off and ejects it. I watch the live feeds to see three teenagers draw all over the lipstick displays with the tester tubes. In the meat aisle some lady is dumping packages of cut chicken into her cart. She’s a regular.

“Dan,” Randy says into his shoulder radio, “chicken lady’s here.”

We watch chicken lady steer her cart to produce, then begin to weigh each package of chicken on the produce scale. If they are off in weight, she corrects the sticker with her magic marker, then recalculates the price.

Dan, a portly man in his thirties who always seems to be out of breath, comes around the corner, and we watch the scuffle as chicken lady tries to keep weighing her chicken, and Dan pulls the marker from her hand and wheels the cart full of chicken away. Chicken lady grabs the back of Dan’s belt, but she’s way too little to make a difference, so he just drags her behind him, her bedroom slippers skidding on the lino. It’s like a demented water skiing act.

“We should set this shit to music,” Randy says, digging through the piles of tapes. He finds the one he wants and pops it in. “This what you’re looking for?”

I check my bag of Twizzlers: still twizzlin’. “Hit me.”

Alice Shand is small on the screen, and the camera isn’t interested in her, because she’s not even in the center of the shot. But there she is, counting out change and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. I have the gestures memorized—first she counts out three fives, then a one, and a quarter, then four pennies. She hands them to the man, and he nods at her. She shrugs and shuts the drawer.

Dorsey turns from his stall, barely visible, but he says something to her, and she bends down under her table to search for the bags I know he’s asked her for.

On the other side of the screen, the man with the stepladder in the extra large cart rolls towards Alice’s lane. It’s hard to watch the thing and not get a tingle at the thought that this time, this time, it will turn out differently. The black and white graininess of the recording makes it feel as if it’s happening in real time. The bags fly up and over Alice’s counter as she yanks them out and throws them towards Dorsey’s lane. They fall way short, and it’s easy to watch them instead of the ladder being slid onto Alice’s conveyor.

The ladder zips along when the man shoves it, but it catches on something, the bend in the conveyor. The man gives it a good hard push just as Alice is coming up from behind the counter. All it takes is a second, and the top of the step ladder is in her face, and her arms come up like an excited umpire screaming, ‘Safe!’

The force of the ladder pushes her from her haunches to the floor, and the man at the counter grabs for the ladder. He’s saying something, probably an apology. Dorsey drops whatever he’s scanning and rounds his counter towards Alice, who is lying on the floor. You can’t see her face in the camera, but I know that the ladder almost pushed her nose all the way into her head.

Dorsey flips the fuck out. He’s flapping his hands and looking around. You can tell by the swell of his chest that he’s screaming at the top of his lungs for help. The man drops the stepladder on the conveyor so that he can run around to help, but the conveyor is still on, and the ladder rolls right to the end, falls into the bagging pit, and onto Alice’s shins before flipping and falling on the rest of her.

The rest of the tape is damage control. Paramedics, police. Boring.

“Just like Jayne Mansfield,” Randy says, pulling the tape out of the player.

“Get out.”

“Saw it on A & E.” Randy ejects the tape. When he moves, this chair squeaks a little bit.

“Why do you still have that, anyway?” I ask.

Randy’s fingers play with the tape cover. “The police made a copy. Store policy to keep originals. I was supposed to turn it in with the monthlies.”

“Why didn’t you?”

On one of the screens we watch a woman shove a frozen turkey up her skirt into what looks like her pregnant belly. I thought people only did that in nineties rock videos.

Randy sighs. “I don’t know. Sentimental reasons.” Then he opens a can of Red Bull.

“Aren’t you going to nab that lady?” I watch her run her fingers over a display of creamed corn cans.

“Are you kidding? They don’t pay me enough to stick my hand into that bitch’s cooch.”

#

“You ever notice that we don’t have a store brand?” Dorsey asks when the night is slow. Randy announces when he goes on smoke breaks in the middle of the night, so we can swipe something from the candy rack and scarf it down before he gets back. The tape is literally unmanned and recorded over by this time the next day.

“Do we need a store brand?” I ask, peeling the wrapper from a Kit-Kat bar.

Dorsey shrugs. I wonder if a serious thought ever passes through his head. Like, a serious thought, like global warming, or teen suicide, or what he’s going to do when he’s forty-seven, living in a shit apartment, and has no benefits program or 401k. Does he think about health insurance? Does he even have it?

“Man, if I ran this place, I’d make a store brand, buy all that shit from China.” A woman walks to his checkout lane and he flips the light off just as she starts to unload her cart. “I’m on break.”

“But your light was on,” she says, brandishing a bag of Oreos.

Dorsey stares at the light, and I can see that he’s thinking about what he can say that won’t get him in trouble.

“Are you sure?” he asks, and I realise he’s going to go for the Star Trek approach, seeing as how Randy is burning one on the loading dock.

The woman pauses and blinks. “Yeah, it was on. You turned it off after I got here.”

There’s one of those Mexican stand-offs, Dorsey smiling and chewing, the lady holding her package of Oreos. The front doors open in a gust of wind when someone walks through, and an empty plastic bag tumbles past our lanes. I finish my Kit-Kat and flick my light on.

“My drawer is closed,” Dorsey says. “I literally can’t open it until my break is over, so I can count out.” He presses the button on the top right that never does anything but beep. “See? Can’t do nothing.”

The woman lowers her package of cookies and hesitates. There’s no point in getting into an argument that you can’t win because a computer won’t open a drawer. I wish I could say that most people come to this conclusion, but most of the time they argue, even when it is true and not an elaborate asshat maneuver.

Her eyes flit from Dorsey to her cart and the things she’s started to put on the conveyor. Then her eyes go to his light and the switch on the stand. At this moment she thinks that if she turns the light on, this register will magically open. It’s tempting.

“I’ll take you over her, ma’am,” I hear myself say, and then wait as she reorients herself over to my area.

Being a checkout cashier is Zen, actually, you slide the things across the scanner, weigh things on a scale and enter a code the computer already knows, ID people when they want alcohol, and scan all their coupons. Somewhere in the middle of every cart I hit a moment when there’s a rhythm to the beeps. When I’m bored I treat it as if I’m making an electronica album.

A kid skids into the lane with a box of frozen Popsicles. “Mom,” he says, shoving the box at her, “I want these.”

I slow down the check out, so that they can converse about the Popsicles, and she can dig in her pocket for coupons. No matter how ready you are to check out, it always feels like you forgot something. I get it. Dorsey is peeling the wrapper from a Baby Ruth and waving it. I know he’s trying to communicate that the candy bar looks like a big turd, because that’s what he says every time he eats one.

The lady finally takes the Popsicles and glances at them, slapping her coupons on the moving belt with her other hand, and it’s all I can do to stop the conveyor before they go under. “Oh, no,” she says, handing the box back to her kid, “we’re not getting those.”

“But I—”

“Put them back.” And the discussion concludes as she turns back to me. Her kid just stands there, box of Popsicles in his hand.

“Fifty-three forty-four,” I tell her, ignoring Dorsey doing the Macarena. Randy has to be back from his break by now. It’s too hard to tell. I don’t know when I’m being watched just by feel. I have to know in advance, which is reassuring, right? That means you’re not psychic, or crazy or something. Psychosomatic, maybe.

Life has gotten easier for cashiers since the invention of the debit machine, and the lady does the inevitable plastic slide so I can bag the rest of her stuff. Out of the corner of my eye I notice the kid still has the Popsicles. His mom stuffs her wallet back into her purse and then notices too.

“I told you to put this back,” she says, and then she takes the Popsicles from her kid’s hand glances in my direction, and then drops them onto the bottom of the check out shelves, under the ancient bags of Corn Nuts.

On her way out the sliding doors, I see her hand scratch her head.

#

Three days later, Dorsey gets caught lifting 35 mm film from the photo department. I’m in the check out lane, processing a nice dude who apparently has the need for AAA batteries, spermicidal jelly, and a copy of The Rocketeer at two in the morning.

It’s a dumb thing to do, shoplift film, really, in the age of digital cameras. When they haul him back into the security office, he’s screaming about how he doesn’t even own a camera. I don’t know anyone who owns a film camera. Sooner or later they will stop making them. I am also waiting for the day when no one ever gets prints of pictures anymore. We sell little keychains you can load a hundred fifty pictures on, and they display on the LED screen in random order.

When I see Randy at lunch, he tells me that Dorsey had been stealing shit for ages. He tried to look the other way because it was always random shit that no one really cared about, and he figured the guy had a disease. Once he watched Dorsey stuff a boxed douche in his pants. He told me that he figured that Dorsey was probably better off where he was, and if the worst he stole was feminine hygiene products, then no one was the wiser.

But on the day that Dorsey lifted the useless film, Randy’s supervisor had been doing his yearly inspection, and Randy couldn’t let it go. He’s called Shecky on the walkie-talkie, and they’d had to drag Dorsey back into the security booth like a common criminal. Which, you know, he rather was.

I am having a silent conversation with Alice Shand from my check out lane. Every time I scan an item, the beep that comes from the computer is her reply. One beep for yes, two for no.

Alice says yes a lot.

I have things I want to ask her, but now isn’t the time and place. I want to ask her, What did it feel like?, and What do you regret?, and Is it just me, or is Dorsey a fucktard? Not many of my questions can be answered with a simple yes or no, except that last one, and so this form of communication isn’t very useful.

“I have a coupon for that,” the lady across from me says, and I wonder when people who use coupons will remember that they’re supposed to give them to me at the end of the order. I scan a package of toilet paper.

Did it hurt? I ask.

Beep.

Beep beep.

“You scanned that twice,” the lady says, and I look at the deodorant in my hand, and then at the screen. There it is, Arrid XX, Arrid XX.

“Sorry,” I say, punching things in the computer and removing the extra charge.

The lady pops a stick of gum in her mouth. “It’s okay. These things happen.”

Beep.

#

Things are quiet in the night without Dorsey. My new checkout companion is a sour faced woman named Madge, who wears moisturizer gloves and says that she has psoriasis. Hand psoriasis. She doesn’t like stealing the candy bard when Randy is on break, and she makes faces at me when I do. Madge doesn’t shut down her register for fun. She doesn’t have ideas about starting a store brand, or whether Herman Muenster eats Munster cheese.

Madge does have opinions about things, and one of those things is Jesus. As in, she loves him. She has never met Jesus in the flesh, she says, as none of us have, because he walked the earth thousands of years ago, but he is going to be coming back soon, and she wants to be ready for him. That is why she sneaks tracts into the bags of customers, but only if they look like they don’t know about Jesus, meaning that they dress improperly or wear hijabs.

Madge is also convinced that bar codes are the mark of the beast, so it’s rather funny that she’s making a living handling so many of them.

“They’re going to give everyone a bar code under the skin,” she tells me one night. I am staring at Alice Shand’s photo. My head itches, but only on the side where they took out the tumor. I pick at the scabs I’ve made there, and half-listen to Madge as she polishes her register. Madge likes things to be disinfected and shiny.

“And the bar code will have all your information on it, and you won’t need anything like credit cards or insurance forms or a driver’s license anymore. When you go to the store, you’ll wave your have over the scanner, and it will deduct it right out of your bank account.”

“That sounds pretty neat,” I say absently. “I won’t have to carry a wallet anymore.”

“It’s enslavement,” Madge says, throwing away her Clorox wipe. “The mark of the beast.”

Randy steps put of the security booth, because the door opens and he slides out, waving at me with two fingers. I take my time staring at the candy bar selection. Today feels like a Kit-Kat day.

“I thought the mark of the beast was supposed to be like, a mark,” I say. I don’t really care about this conversation. It’s something to fill the space in between the noises that I hear when I’m chewing a candy bar.

“That’s what they want you to think,” Madge says patiently. “But see, the mark of the beast is just an instrument to enslave the masses without their knowledge.”

I don’t tell her, but I think television might be the mark of the beast. The candy bar is the best thing in my universe right now, and I think that I the future I will not mind swiping my hand over the scanner to buy one.

Under the crackle of the wrapper, I can hear the hum of the scanner in front of me, the roll of the conveyor belt, that I have taken to not turning off, even though after what happened to Alice, all employees are reminded regularly that an empty rolling belt is a hazard. My grandmother used to have a wringer washer that had two roller you fed clothing through to squeeze out excess water. Sometimes I want to put a wet paper towel on the conveyor just to see if the belt would squeeze out the water on the way around.

“If we all had chips in our hands,” I said, watching for the same grease mark to come back around on the rubber belt, “then there wouldn’t any more unidentified bodies.”

Madge frowns at my stolen candy bar. “That’s one of the defenses they’ll use when they push for it in Congress,” she tells me,. She has thought this out. She has a whole thing. This is her life dissertation, and I should probably leave it alone.

But I can’t. “You could just chop off your hand.”

“That will be illegal.”

“Why can’t you just say no? Like some people don’t have a bank account or anything.”

“They’ll eliminate paper money.”

“I think that’s unlikely.”

Beep beep.

I am not sure if Alice agrees with me or not. It’s not like I can ask her now. Or ever, really.

#

The store is having a sale on school supplies. Randy had joked about wearing riot gear, though there had been something in his eyes that said he wasn’t joking. Madge has only been here for about three weeks, and I have only been here for about four months, so perhaps what he’s said has merit, I think as I watch the shopper roaming the extra aisles, stocked with pencils and folders and pocket calculators. Already today the theft alarm at the front door has gone off five times, once for a computer wedged into a woman’s purse, and four other times by mistake. Rather, what were assumed to be mistakes, but which were probably thieves who were too clever for us to find anything on them.

I am sliding my fiftieth case of pencils across the scanner when it just goes batshit, scanner being stuck on a permanent beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. I smash a few buttons on the keyboard, and that doesn’t do anything. The man across the counter from me starts, and then claps his hands to his ears.

“I didn’t do anything!” he yells.

Marc, the shift supervisor, comes around the counter to smack at my scanner. It’s one of those old school ones with the red asterisk-looking lights under the glass. His palms leave grease parks on the surface as he whacks away at it, because as we all know, hitting computers is the best way to fix them.

Madge’s eyes are wide and she turns to us to watch what is going on,. Everyone is in fact staring at me, at the machine, at the supervisor exercising expert control with his bludgeoning.

I am about to tell him to give it up when he lifts his hand up to bring it down again and the beeping just ceases. The screen scrolls the price and waits, cursor blinking patiently. $666.66.

“They’s three for ten dollars,” the man offers helpfully. The supervisor voids the transaction and I rescan. Everything is in perfect working order.

“It’s a sign,” Madge hisses at me when he walks away.

#

On the way to my car that night I hear noises from the dumpster. The dumpsters at these box stores are veritable cornucopias of wealth, if one comes at the right times. I have been known myself to pick through the top layer and retrieve a few boxes of barely-expired Hot Pockets.

There are cameras trained on the dumpsters for just such reasons. There’s a whole group of people that dive the dumpsters about town, reclaiming perfectly good garbage, dried goods, wilty produce, eggs that have just passed their sell-by date but which are probably still good if it’s winter and you like Russian roulette. We’re supposed to chase them away when we see them, but it’s really not worth the effort. They seem to think that the trash is their sacred birthright, and I’m not about to get into it with them.

On the other hand if they find something good, I might want some. I tuck my vest in my bag and round the corner to the back of the store.

The floodlights are in full bloom, painting large awkward shadows on the asphalt. Only one of those shadows is moving, a rounded hump inside the dumpster itself, an arched back, an ass cresting over the dumpster rim like a rising human sun. A large box of frozen soft pretzel bites sails over the rim of the dumpster to land near a haphazard pile of artifacts: three bags of cheese doodles, a slightly damaged box set of Quincy, M.E seasons 1 and 2, twelve skeins of yarn, and about ten foam pool noodles.

“Hey, man,” I say, loud enough to be heard over the thumping and rustling of moving trash bags. There shouldn’t be many trash bags in there—we only use them for restroom and outside garbage—but their contents alone would make me not want to be digging about in there just in case one o them broke open. Just recently Shecky caught some guy shitting in all the urinals. That would be a nasty bag to accidentally rip open.

“Really, you shouldn’t be out here. They’re gonna send someone out here–” I stop when Dorsey’s head appears at the lip of the dumpster. There’s a Dora the Explorer sticker plastered to his forehead.

“Hey man,” he says in greeting, then holds something up. “Found a six pack of Fanta.” The bottles hang from his fingers like orange grapes on steroids. “Wanna?”

I lift my hand in a catch gesture, and Dorsey peels one of the bottles out from the plastic rings, shakes it up with a big grin, and tosses it. I stare at the label and wonder why it was in the dumpster. Does soda expire?

“You know they’re gonna come out here and toss you,” I say, stiffing the bottle into my hoodie pocket. I’ll gve it time to settle down.

Dorsey shrugs. “Whatever.” He climbs over the edge of the dumpster and then swings his legs around, so that he’s perched on the edge. His ass hangs off the metal like over-risen dough in a too-small pan. He’s unwrapping Tootsie Rolls and tossing the wrappers into the dumpster behind him. I stand there and finger my keys in my posket. Just out of idle curiosity, I try to find my house key without looking at them; it has three holes in the top.

“You ever wonder what happened to Alice Shand?” Dorsey drawls around a mouthful of expired Tootsie Rolls. He swings his feet so that the heels of them bang on the side of the dumpster.

“I know what happened to her,” I tell him. “I saw the tape.” I don’t tell him that I have seen the tape about a dozen times.

Dorsey chokes on his mouthful, or he laughs and sounds like a barking seal, someone with whooping cough, maybe. “You saw the tape, yeah,” he says, not really asking a question. “Punched in her face like a bag of dicks.” He hits the rim of the dumpster and loses his balance, falls backwards.

The weather is a little chilly, and I don’t have a coat. I turn to go when I hear him pull himself upright in the dumpster, slightly wheezing with the effort.

“What if what you saw was a lie?” he asks. He is haloed by the lights so that I can’t see his face, just his form, dark and formless, like a ghost trapped in a black tarp. “What if that didn’t happen that way?”

I back away. Randy will be out here soon to kick Dorsey off the property, and I don’t want to have to be here for that, don’t want to have to fill out paperwork; there’s always paperwork. “I saw the tape, Dorsey,” I remind him. “It’s pretty much all on there.” I don’t think much of turning my back on Dorsey. It’s in the dumpster, still, and he’d have to climb out to even get near me. Not that Dorsey is the violent type anyway.

“The conveyor wasn’t moving when he put that thing on it,” Dorsey calls out. “It started by itself.”

That does make me pause, and I think back to the conveyor in the video. Had it been moving? Or had it started before the ladder hit it? After? The conveyors are trained to stop when something hits the sensor at the edge, right before the scanner. Even if it had gotten caught on the scanner–

“The guy shoved it,” I say.

“Did he.” Dorsey sounds smug, as if he has discovered the secrets of the universe.

“Yeah, he did,” I say. “You’re insane, Dorsey.”

But in my head, I play the tape all the way home.

#

“This is unhealthy,” Randy says, tossing away a can of Red Bull into the recycling bin. “Seriously, man, it’s like Jeffrey Dahmer sick or something.”

I ignore him and instead slow down the tape, watching the graininess of Alice Shand’s movements on the screen. It isn’t even that the image is grainy. It’s that it’s far away. I can see Dorsey in the checkout lane next to her, waving.

The conveyor is difficult to see clearly. It’s blocked by the credit card machine and that little fucking platform everyone puts their coupons on and then expects me to see.

AND THEN I SORT OF LOST STEAM AND CARING.

THERE WAS THIS:

I take the photo of Alice from the frame and stare at it. Then I stick it in my back pocket. Under Alice’s photo is a collection of all the photos on previous Employees of the Month. There’s Randy and Dorsey, A half-dozen people I don’t know at all, two people who are still here,. And one guy from the stock room who they apparently made Employee of the Month once when he passed his monthly drug test for the first time. Last night I sold him about fifteen bottles of pseudophenedrine, so I am guessing he’s not on the straight and narrow anymore.

I wedge Dorsey’s ass shot behind the plastic and screw the nuts back down to clamp it in place. My scalp feels like a parade of insects is running across the surface, and I clench my fingers reflexively. The overhead music is something soft and reassuring, MC Billy Joel or DJ Barry Manilow.

AND THEN I REALLY LOST IT.

REST IN PEACE ALICE SHAND.

Link!

The other interviews are lovely! I think I was supposed to be in a twitterchat, too, but I might have missed it. Sadface. Deets as I get them.

Reblogged from Whatever:

A wildly funny, irreverent tale of murder, mayhem, and the mob.

When up-and-coming chef Tommy Pagana settles for a less than glamorous stint at his uncle’s restaurant in Manhattan’s Little Italy, he unwittingly finds himself a partner in big-time crime. And when the mob decides to use the kitchen for a murder, nothing Tommy learned in cooking school has prepared him for what happens next. With the FBI on one side, and his eccentric wise guy superiors on the other, Tommy has to struggle to do right by his conscience, and to avoid getting killed in the meantime.

In the vein of Prizzi’s Honor, Bone in the Throat is a thrilling Mafia caper laced with entertaining characters and wry humor. This first novel is a must-have for fans of Anthony Bourdain’s nonfiction.

So here’s the thing. I was gonna just slap it in my finished list and give it some stars until I realised that I wasn’t sure HOW many stars to give it. And that started a whole barrage of questions, so I think I’ll just talk out loud here.

Of course I liked the book. It has all the things I love: murder, swearing, the mob, everyday people just being people, people who smoke, people who casually drink, people who casually do drugs, food porn, real porn, and unflinchingly real descriptions of mundane life. Bourdain, at one point mentions that a woman in the shower hums the final Jeopardy theme to time her conditioner. I like that kind of random shit. And I liked the ending. The last line has a swear word in it. I like that stuff.

On the other hand, a lot of the things I like are kind of indulgent. A session of the main character prepping the kitchen for service starts on page 35 and goes until page 39. Paragraph after paragraph of “then he added cumin, and chanterelled the mushrooms, and peeled some garlic.” I can see how some people would think that was excessive and indulgent. I can see how structurally it’s almost too much for the books. There’s a whole scene about a secondary character almost getting busted whilst scoring H that doesn’t really have a place in the book. BUT I loved it.

But when I’m assigning star to something, it gets harder. I vacillate between the validity of the stars. In fact, to use a bit from the book to illustrate:

“What does [Al's wife] cook when it’s like your birthday, special occasion, and she wants to lay it on right for you? It’s gotta be…there’s not to be one thing she makes for that, right? One thing she does real good. Something special. With my mom, it was veal saltimbocca. she’d go down to the store and bitch at the guy till she got the right piece of veal, fight over the price, then she’d come home and pound the shit outta that veal with this mallet she had…I guess it wasn’t that good, to be honest. I seen a lot of veal saltimbocca since then. But I loved it. I still love it. Moms are like that. They get themselves a small repertoire of things they think they do real well, and then they do it over and over.”

This kind of writing is Bourdain’s veal saltimbocca, and it’s mine too. So what do I do? Give it four stars? Is this when we start arguing about “How could you like that crap?” Someone somewhere out there gave Twilight five stars, and I don’t know if I have the balls to say that was a bad thing on their part.

So what do I do? I give it four stars for everything I love. I give it two stars as an objective reader. Three means it was “meh”.

But it wasn’t meh to me, right? It was fricking awesome. Two characters briefly discuss whether or not it’s classy to run over a body of a person you just shot with your stolen car (Misplaced modifier is misplaced, i know.). “It gets forensics on the wheels.” LOL. Later two characters talk about the guilty pleasure foods they love (Al’s wife makes him red jello with fruit cocktail in it and he LOVES it.). I love that stuff, the sidebar kibitzing.

So yeah, Bourdain, I see what you did thar. You awesome guy, you.

PS: reading this kind of stuff gives me potty mouth.

But some people have asked for a few things:

1. Are going to put this up for sale anywhere? Probably not. I released it into the wild, and it has been free for a week, and it should be free. I feel skeevy making money on it now.

That said, I am going to include it in a book of short stories available later this year, probably from Lulu, just for giggles.

2. Are you going to expand it? Probably not.

3. Can I e-book it? I guess you can, but please don’t pass it about too much? I mean, I can’t stop you, but I kind of I dunno, prefer to be able to see the pdf and approve it. I dunno. It just seems strange. But like I said, I can’t stop you.

4. ARE THERE SHIRTS?

Y YES THERE ARE! You can now buy the shirt! All proceeds go to Planned Parenthood. Thanks to the awesome S. Evelyn Vincent over at Octopus Gallery for the design and running the shop. She’s good people, and while you’re at zazzle, stop by her real shop.

5. Are there armbands?

Dear god I hope never.

6. DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE RETWEETED BY FAKE RICK SANTORUM? Yes, yes I did, and it is beautiful.

Lastly. Thank you for all the links and facebook posts and tweets and retweets. Every day I feel heartened that I’m not the only one who feels this way, and that there are a lot of us.

 ILU-486

 for Evil Dr. Em and the twitter brigade

Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way? James 2:25

About fifteen percent of Merrimack, Virginia was unemployed, but by god, they had congressmen looking out for them. It was comforting, one could have thought as they sat in the dim light of the living room and flipped through the government channels to watch lawmakers burn the midnight oil and make more laws.

“In this desensitized society, there is a shortening list of things that criminals consider punishment,” droned Representative Carter, a white man from Maryville. “They’re better fed in jail than they would be out on the streets. We give them free educations, money for working. We give them health care.”

One of these aforementioned unemployed people was Penelope Gallagher, a tall thin woman with a horsey face and a nervous twitch in her eye whenever she heard the sounds of a congressional meeting on the television. There was a certain crackle in the back of the recording, like a thousand hissing cockroaches.

“If jail isn’t a deterrent, then we need punishments that will work. Punishments that are effective.”

Her husband was asleep in front of the set, supine and sprawled on the recliner. There should have been something on the TV worth watching, but that seemed so old-fashioned now. Penelope tried to remember when television was for fun. These days every time she stared at the screen, she just wanted to stab something.

“Passing Proposal 404—the Punitive Display Edict is the first step in reclaiming our streets, our state, and eventually our country.”

She stood, turned off the set with a click and listened to the sound of the house, quiet creaking, the heater blower, and her husband’s soft snore. Then she opened the front hall closet, pried up the boards in the floor under the row of galoshes and pulled out the black bag she’d hidden in there. She covered her face and hands with the black knit gloves and mask she had stashed there, shrugged on the sack, zipped up her coat and boots and was out the door.

#

Kayleigh Bent had a full backpack. She ran down an alley towards the park with the jungle gym, her boots barely making any noise on the concrete. Just once, she wished that she could swing from rooftop to rooftop like Batman or something. Alas, that was something she would never master.

It would have been cool, though.

Her team met in the darkness behind the closed middle school. The few floodlights back there had been strategically broken and lazily never replaced. Kayleigh had heard that P. had shot them out with a BB gun, but she’d never asked. One of the rules was that you didn’t know much about the other people, so if you got caught you couldn’t tell much.

Kayleigh hid behind a dumpster and smoked a cigarette. Her mom hadn’t figured out yet that she was sneaking out, but she had caught her stealing smokes. She was down to her last pack, and she didn’t know when she’d get any more. They only sold them to men and women who carried nonbirthing cards.

The headlights of the van cut across the parking lot when it pulled into the back of the school. Kayleigh stayed where she was until the lights flicked on and off a few times, and she knew it was her ride. She ditched the smoke, pulled on her cotton gloves and ran for the van, which only slowed enough for her to jog alongside it.

“Hey,” G. said as she rolled open the side door. P. waved in the driver’s seat. “Busy night tonight.”

Kayleigh slung her pack into the van and they trucked off into the night. Her heart started to thud in her chest like a runaway drum set. G. was laying out a suction set, just in case. P. turned out onto the street and mumbled something under her breath, probably the address of where they were going.

“How are you guys?” Kayleigh asked, kicking her backpack under the passenger seat of the van. The rest of the van aside from the driver’s seat was devoted to medical equipment and pharmaceuticals—if they were ever stopped by the police that would be the end of them all.

G. held up an IV bag of something and read the label. “Oh, you know, just another day in paradise.”

#

Rachel Saunders had three kids and two bedrooms. Both boys were fast asleep in the bigger one, and her oldest, Peyton, was bedded down in the other room. Rachel had given up a bedroom when Peyton had turned thirteen, and now she used the couch out in the living/dining room. Right now she sat in the kitchen window and stared out at the fire escape.

She’d gotten home about an hour ago, had a shower, checked to make sure the kids weren’t dead, and then paid a few bills. She watched about fifteen minutes of the newest report on the congressional hearing about the gallows proposal.

Rachel wasn’t sure what she thought of the gallows. It wasn’t like they didn’t already have the death penalty. And this seemed barbaric and horrible, displaying bodies for everyone to see. Wasn’t that something they used to do in the middle ages?

Senator Collux had appeared on the screen arguing for the gallows. “There’s a reason this technique has been around since time immemorial,” Senator Collux said, waving a hand. “In all of the states where it’s been initiated—Utah, Texas, South Carolina, Iowa—it’s been directly linked to a downturn in contraceptive smuggling and illegal abortion. If this is what it takes to preserve the lives of innocent Virginians who don’t have the opportunity to defend themselves, then I am all for it. And if it provides solace to the victims of other violent crimes, that’s even better.”

He used the example of the man who had raped and killed fifteen nuns with a ball peen hammer last year. He’d confessed. When they’d found the man, he’d been wearing a wimple with the nun’s face skin still in it. If there was anyone in this universe that deserved the public’s ire, it was this man. This monster, Collux argued, deserved to be humanely executed and displayed on the gallows for everyone to see. But only for three weeks. Any longer was in danger of spreading pestilence.

Rachel shrugged and turned the television off. Then she stared at the fire escape, biting all of her cuticles into ragged bleeding tears.

She was worried because she’d taken three large white pills a day ago, and while she was clotting and cramping and the like, if she didn’t get taken care of soon, she was going to have to explain the miscarriage to the police. They would find out. She didn’t know how they did, but she was already on warning. Sally swore they had detectors in the sewer pipes, but that sounded ridiculous.

The instructions said to wait. Don’t pack a bag. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t plan for childcare. Nothing bad will happen. Just wait. Pretend nothing is amiss. We come to you.

There was more, of course. She understood that she had taken mifepristone, and that if she hadn’t yet miscarried, then she’d need the second drug. More importantly, she needed to get rid of the evidence. Terminating a fetus in any way was a crime, even if it was an accident. According to the cop she saw last time, there were no accidents, only what he called “accidents”, with finger quotes.

Rachel hadn’t been sure what he had meant by that. What she did know was that she had three kids, a bad job, and an ex-boyfriend who’d thought condoms were the devil. He’d said that once, that condoms were the devil, and when she had laughed at him, he’d smacked her one across the face. She might have been happy, or at least okay with marrying him for the added income until that had happened. Then three days later, the bruise still fresh on her face, she’d taken the test, seen the pink lines, and thanked god she hadn’t used the local clinic for the free pregnancy test. Sure it was free, but the moment it was positive, you were entered in the free natal care monitoring system.

She’d done what she’d heard whispered about at work in the diner, put a red kerchief on her window sill and closed the sash, just letting it hang there, and after about three days she’d noticed it was gone. In its place was a little flowerpot with a little violet sitting precariously on the ledge. She’d found the packet with the pills and the paper inside the dirt, under the roots, and almost wept with relief.

Now, she waited for something to happen. Maybe the cops would come. Maybe it was all a set-up. Her kids slept on. She could hear her upstairs neighbor kick on his video game machine and load some game with a lot of machine guns.

There was a knock at her door, and Rachel felt her heart almost stutter. She plodded to the door. Maybe she could just ignore it and it would all go away. She was in the process of reaching for the doorknob when she was seized with a cramp and she had to freeze, suck in a breath. No, there was no going back, not since she’d swallowed a few pills the day before.

She swung the door open and was grabbed by the arms before she could even say anything.

“This won’t take long,” someone hissed in her ear. “We love you. Every part of you belongs to you.”

Rachel felt her feet being fitted into her clogs, her coat being thrown about her shoulders. Upstairs the machine guns rattled on. Her kids slept through anything. She went a little limp, trudged between the two people wearing masks, leading her down the hallway and out the front doors of the apartment complex, towards a running van.

One of the masked people poked her in the ribs. “Just struggle a little. Make it look real.”

“The drug testing,” Rachel said as they shoved her into the van. Even though she was willing to go, they treated her as if they were taking her by force. “If I get called in, they’ll be able to tell.”

Her first abductor winked. “Don’t worry, you were kidnapped. We forced you to do this.” She, for it was a she, they were all shes, leaned into Rachel’s face, and she could see the little edges of smile through her mask. “It was horrible,” she cooed. “We are evil, wretched women, doing this to you.”

“Where did you come from?” Rachel asked. She wondered who they were. She couldn’t see their faces. They could be her friends, right? They could be her kid’s teachers, or the lady who served her coffee. They could be the minister’s wife. “How do you even do this?” The van peeled away, rocking back and forth with the sharp right turn.

“Like a thief in the night,” the masked face said, and behind the knit, Rachel could see the smile again. “Now just lie back. Gee is going to give you a sedative, and this will be over soon.” The woman ran a hand on Rachel’s forehead. “You’re being brave, and we’re going to keep you safe.”

Rachel might have said something about them being angels, but that didn’t seem right. But at the same time they were the biggest grace she could have imagined.

#

“We might have a new source over at public health,” P. said as they sat in the back of the van and stuffed packages by streetlight. Interior lights alerted the police to the fact that the van had people in it, and they got curious. Police really only ever had two modes, really—unnecessarily curious or inconveniently ambivalent, as far as Grace Bell was concerned.

“Yeah? Can she hack the monitoring codes?” The control of the random drug testing system enacted by the legislature two years ago was based in the computers at the department of environmental protection. It was one of those logic puzzles that led into a deeper and deeper hole—the Personhood Act prohibited birth control and classified it under the illegal drug act, but it was also illegal to just randomly test women to find out. But the release of estrogen through urine was an environmental hazard, so it was monitored by sensors attached to plumbing.

Smart women on birth control peed in a jar and tossed it in public trash cans in another part of town. But there was always some woman who forgot, and all it took was one. The sensor triggered the public health department, and out they came with their pink clipboards and enzyme strips. For the greater good of the environment.

They took women away when they tested positive., They always came back, but they didn’t seem the same. And most of the time they were visibly pregnant in a few months. Grace had never managed to convince one to talk about what had happened, but that was mostly her fault, not theirs. Once someone was caught, as cruel as it sounded, all the women in the community pulled away from her. It wasn’t her fault, but it was far the greater good, really. Grace hated the phrase “greater good”, actually. Perhaps they should replace it with “lesser bad.”

“It’s a man,” P. said, stapling the instructions for the mifepristone onto the little bag and tossing it in the smaller box. The larger box was filled with bottles of birth control pills, each bottle varying in size and label so that there was no uniform design that could give them away.

“Veto,” K. said, stuffing three packets of white pills in the hem of her cargo pants. “No men.”

“They’re not all bad,” P said, and Grace had to agree with them both. “I think he’s gay.”

K. snorted. “Any gay man with any sense left the minute they reenacted the sodomy bill.”

Grace shook her head and smiled at her hands. Ah, youth. “Who vouched for him?”

P. folded a paper in threes. “F. over at Bimouac.” Bimouac was three towns over, and they had a good record for staying under the radar. Grace wanted to be able to trust them. It would have been really useful to have someone fucking up the sensors at environmental monitoring, but failing that, they would have liked someone to screw with the ones at public health. As it was, they relied on Anonymous to do a lot of their deeper hack-work, and it wasn’t always fruitful or timely. And sometimes Anonymous planted pedo-bear gifs in the site, which, while funny, didn’t help them stay incognito.

Grace stripped off her gloves and stuffed them in the bag, then replaced them with the cotton ones she used when she wasn’t providing treatment or filling pill bottles. P. and K. did the same.

“No,” she said, finally. “Even if he isn’t a plant, there’s no way to know.”

K. shrugged on her filled backpack and slapped a black cap on her blonde hair. “My point,” she said, then blew a bubble with her gum. P. looked faintly annoyed. “See ya.”

Then she dove out of the van and dashed off into the dark, three addresses burned into her mind, and three dozen more written in Wingdings on her shoes.

P. shook her head and smiled. “I wish I was her age,” she said wistfully.

Grace shrugged. “At least you remember when we didn’t have to do this.”

#

Keisha Thompson sat on the toilet seat and cried again. She didn’t need this.

Okay, so she hadn’t listened too carefully in sex ed, if you could call it that. They mentioned all the bad shit that came with sex, like disease and babies, but they hadn’t mentioned how to get around it, except for not having it. And when Bobby had told her that he’d heard aspirin would kill the sperm if she put it up there before they got it on, she’d figured he knew what he was talking about.

She had thought about condoms, but Bobby had said that they killed, like the spiritual symbolism of the thing, and plus the rubber hurt his pubic hair.

It had been amazing, and Keisha wasn’t sure why sex was a bad thing, well, not that sex was a bad thing. They said that sex was a bad thing if you weren’t married, because of the things that could happen. All she could think was Jesus, if it was this awesome when she wasn’t married, how great would it be once she was?

As it was, sixteen was too young to be getting married, she thought. She hadn’t even finished high school. And Bobby was nice and all, but he didn’t even have a car.

Brandie had told her once that her older sister got birth control by hanging a white shirt out her window, so that it was visible from the street. A few days later a little bottle of pills had arrived, with instructions on how to take them. When she was out, Brandie’s sister just tucked some money in the bottle and dumped it in a flower pot on her windowsill. The bottle was eventually replaced. Brandie told her that even when her sister didn’t have money to put in the bottle, they still refilled it.

She had heard, Brandie said, that if you needed something else, if it was too late for birth control, you could change the white color to red.

It had been worth a try. Keisha had stuck a red sock out on the bathroom window, wedged in between the sash and the sill, just a little visible. Then she had waited.

The first night nothing had happened. Then her mother had found the sock and given her a look. But she’d left it there.

The second night, she’d fallen asleep on the floor of the bathroom waiting for something to happen. She’d woken in the morning to her brother banging on the door shouting about needing to piss. Nothing.

Keisha didn’t know how long she had, really. She was afraid to Google pregnancy in case there was some tracer somewhere that logged that stuff. If she hadn’t been pregnant, she wouldn’t have had any problem going to the reference section in the library and looking up things in a medical book or something, but now that she was, she worried that she was being watched. Where were the cameras? Were there really sensors in the plumbing? If she threw herself down the stairs, would they know she’d done it on purpose? What if it didn’t work? What if it killed her instead?

Keisha’s mom was at work, and her brother had passed out in front of the TV at midnight, so there was no reason she couldn’t just sit there on the toilet seat and wait for something to happen. Would they leave her something if she was right there? What was that saying about pots and boiling? When Keisha was a kid, she’d sat up waiting for Santa, but he’d never seemed to come until she fell asleep. Of course, Santa was really her mom, so that wasn’t going to work here; she was a hundred percent sure the abortion fairy was not her mother.

Keisha didn’t have any more tears. Her face felt hot and blotchy, and she’d used almost half a roll of toilet paper. She poured herself a glass of water from the spigot and slumped on the floor under the window. Maybe if they didn’t see her in there they might leave her something. Maybe she was scaring them away. She covered her cold feet with a towel and turned out the lights.

It was still dark when she heard a sort of bonking at the window. Keisha woke from a sound sleep at the kerthonk of something hitting the glass, and she froze, not daring to move. If she moved too quickly, they’d run, like deer and take whatever they had with them.

Someone jumped down from the stone fence and into the gravel driveway. The pebbles crunched under their feet, and then went silent when they hit the sidewalk.

She gave that person a few more seconds, and then scrambled up to see what was on the windowsill.

Brandie had said that her sister used a flower pot, but there was nothing like that there. Instead, her sock was rolled into a ball and set on the sill. Keisha lifted the sash and blinked at it. Her heart felt like it was going so fast, her breath couldn’t keep up with it. Her head was hollow, and her stomach fluttered. She snatched the sock from the sill and slammed the window shut, then she unrolled it and let the contents fall into her hand.

“Oh my god,” she whispered as she stared at the little bag with the three white pills and a folded paper of instructions in it. Stapled to the bag was a pink paper heart with typed information:

HELLO THERE. WE HEARD U NEED THIS.
DON’T WORRY, WE LOVE YOU.
EVERY PART OF YOU BELONGS TO YOU.

Keisha glanced out the window, and down the block she saw a flash of something move. It could have been a person in black. It could have been a dog.

“Oh my god,” she breathed, the package already sweaty in her clenched fist. “Thank you.”

#

“Mom, have you seen my shoes?” Kayleigh called from her bedroom. “The ones with the marker?”

There was a noncommittal reply from the kitchen, and Kayleigh flipped up her dust ruffle again, peering into the masses of crumpled papers and old chip bags. They couldn’t be back there.

It wasn’t like she couldn’t make her collections without them. She had backup copies of her route on a skillet in the basement, and in a glass jar stuffed into the dirt in the corner of the unused sandbox in the park. It was that the shoes were so convenient. And lucky. Since she’d started using them, she hadn’t gotten caught once.

In reality, she mused as she laced on her boots and frowned at how wrong they felt on her feet, it was a miracle they hadn’t been rounded up yet. It was probably a matter of time, but until then, Kayleigh was going to keep on keeping on.

Besides, no one ever said anything. No woman who wanted an abortion ever told anyone else what happened in the night. It was a mystery spoken about in whispers, scrawled on the stalls of women’s restrooms. It was word of mouth, it was a Bat signal in the sky, a red sock hung outside a window. Kayleigh liked the red thing. She’d gotten the idea from a Bible story.

Even when no one knew anyone else’s business, women could recognize each other in the sparks that filled their eyes when they passed one another, a shadow that slid across their faces and said, I know, I know, too. Men and the women who agreed with them thought all those looks meant the normal things: I need chocolate, or My husband doesn’t take out the trash, or Today is a good day for shoe shopping. And often it was a good day for shoe shopping or chocolate, and any time was a good time for shared spousal duties, but that wasn’t all it meant.

All this unity didn’t mean that there weren’t what Kayleigh called “fuck ups”. Messages went to the wrong place. Women took the pill and failed the drug test. The abduction didn’t go well and something bad happened. Once they’d lost a woman in the back of the van, having a stroke right there in S’s arms.

Before, you know, S. was taken away. Sometimes Kayleigh missed her the most, S. with her low voice and cigarettes, her burning hatred and quick fingers. S. had taken the blame for all of them, and Kayleigh had resolved to never be suckered in by a man again.

Very occasionally, they miscalculated the woman. More than once a woman had turned in the pills to her husband. Maybe she got cold feet, maybe she was a set up, it was hard to tell. People were hauled in, threatened, sometimes beaten, but it was easy to get out of the more physical stuff if you just said that you might be pregnant. No man wanted to be brought up on charges because he’d deleted a personhood in utero. Kayleigh used it every time she got hauled in, even though it was pretty obvious from the first urine test that she wasn’t. She did it to make them waste time and money. They deserved all the wasting they got, actually.

Like now, when she skipped out of the house, bag empty on her back, and they came screaming mimi around the corner, lights flashing. One officer opened his door and aimed a pistol at her. Kayleigh knew the drill. She threw her hands up and smiled. She was clean; none of them took birth control just in case they were picked up. It was an unspoken agreement.

“Hey officers, where’s the fire?”

The police officer, a young, fresh-faced dude with razor burn on his neck, put his gun up. “Kayleigh Bent, you’re wanted for questioning for contraband trafficking and violation of the Personhood Act.”

Kayleigh rolled her eyes and held her wrists out. “Again? You boys are in a tizzy.”

The back door to the cruiser opened and Detective Becking stepped out. He’d been on her ass for six months, ever since she’d turned eighteen. He held up a plastic bag filled with bottles in one hand, and a pair of shoes in another. “Forget something?”

Kayleigh cocked her head. “What are you talking about?”

Detective Becking shook his head, tossing the cuffs to the officer. “You’re not the only one who can read Wingdings, you know. I made your collections for you.”

Kayleigh shrugged as the young officer snapped the cuffs on her wrists. She tried to keep her face nonchalant, but her insides twisted. And if she wasn’t careful, they’d see that the rest of her would, too. Maybe they already had.

#

Three days later, Grace sat in a little diner on the corner of Main Street and President Avenue and sipped a cup of coffee. She was wondering about what she should do with the body in her van. She couldn’t keep it there forever, and she didn’t have the knowledge of security cameras that she should have. With her luck she’d pick a spot to dump the body that would be the most highly-monitored spot in the entire state, and fifteen cameras and satellites would get high-definition shots of her face.

But the fact remained that she had to do something with it. P. hadn’t shown up the night before last, and K. hadn’t made her money drop today. Their runner from Maryland had sent Grace an angry text: this shit isn’t free, bitch. Too true. And yet.

The waitress refilled Grace’s coffee and sighed at the television. They were the only people in the diner; it was one in the morning, and everyone was home by now. Bars had been on a midnight close for three years.

“Ms. Bent, with an arrest record for previous acts of personhood violation, tested positive for chemical birth control during interrogation,” the voice-over droned. “Police are investigating her connection to the abortion ring that has been operating in the area, distributing contraband drugs and performing the illegal operations from a mobile unit. Anyone with any information to the movements of this group is strongly urged to contact police.”

Grace stared at the screen, at the image of the blonde teenager glaring sullenly at the camera. There was makeup over her eye; it was easy to see. They had roughed her up before they even bothered to take the mug shot. Grace wondered what she had told them, if she had told them anything. They already had all of the women on Kayleigh’s birth control route. The only women who were actually safe in all of this were the ones who’d had abortions—at least they had the relatively flimsy excuse of being “abducted”. Though she had heard that a woman over Maryville had accused a co-worker of slipping birth control in her coffee—a charge that couldn’t be substantiated. That was one way to do it.

Of course, none of the planning in the universe could help her come up with a thing to do with the dead body in the back of the van. It was the first time she’d actually had one in the back of her van. When she worked at the hospitals and they had a dead body, there were people who took it away. Now it was just her and P. and P. had disappeared, sort of.

Grace knew where P lived—she’d followed her home one night. She’d sent her a few texts on the disposable phone, but only received one short inexplicable reply: cant talk-sewing.

What did that even mean? Grace drained her coffee and stared at the sediment in the bottom of her mug.

On the television, the voice-over continued with the history of the gallows in the United States, from its abolition in the past to the new resurgence of corpse display popping up all over the country. It showed the mass protests in Nevada and Kansas, the ones that had ended in gunfire and tear gassing. Also shown were the Portland migrations and the New York Sequestering, when the city had setup the road blocks and guard houses. If someone had told Grace twenty years ago that New York City would elect to pull out of the state government and the United States would let them, she would have called them insane.

“New York City-State, which still allows abortion and the free distribution of birth control, is in negotiations with the outer New York State for the management of waste water. Mayor Brady demands that waste water be processed outside the city walls, but the outer state continues to insist that they are not equipped to filter out the hormones carried in the water.” The voice-over ended and the screen cut back to the anchor, Jaclyn Pernassis. “New York City-State remains the largest non-personhood compliant state.”

“Gibbeting,” the waitress said, facing away from her, pot in one hand, transfixed by the television screen in the corner. “That poor girl’s gonna be put up there for everyone to see.”

Grace shook her head. She didn’t know if she should agree, or look shocked, or if the waitress was displaying actual pity for Kayleigh Bent. Then when she turned to Grace, her face was resigned and sad. “I always remember that word because I used to confuse it with giblets.”

“It’ll never pass,” Grace told the waitress, whose name tag read Florence.

Florence stared at her for a second, as if she was thinking of something to say. Then she just shook her head and walked back behind the counter to take down the menu board, wiping it down with a rag before uncapping a marker and going to work on it.

Grace wondered what they would do to Kayleigh. Until now women in the movement, if she could even call it that, sort of disappeared. If they reappeared later, they were scared, and, of course, they were cut off. She’d never talk to Kayleigh again, even if they let her out tomorrow. Some women were still in jail. Grace’s mentor, Xenia, was still in there, supposedly. You couldn’t talk to them in jail either. It was too easy to be tagged in the system for extra monitoring.

Grace had been printed when she had had her hospital ID issued. So far that hadn’t worked against her. She didn’t have the kind of tag that logged her movements, not like the pharmacy workers did, or the morgue attendants. It made her mobility pretty free.

Free to do things like dump the body in her van (because hey yeah, back to that, right?). Grace felt horrible about the body–the woman; Dana Landry had developed sepsis after her procedure. Grace had tried to do what she could, but she didn’t have access to the antibiotics that she needed to treat it. It happened rarely, but it did happen. Most of the time she could anonymously drop the woman off at an emergency room and be on her way, knowing that the woman would be well taken care of, if shaken up. But this time, Dana had clutched her jacket and screeched, “NO HOSPITAL. NO HOSPITAL.” Sometimes they were like this—terrified of anyone finding out what they’d done.

Grace had given her a painkiller and then considered her options, and while she had been sitting there next to Dana, the woman had just stopped moving, breathing, everything. CPR didn’t do anything. By the time she had gotten to a hospital, she had known that it was a lost cause. And the hospitals were all on alert, had been since Kayleigh’s arrest.

Grace’s eyes burned, but no tears came. She wasn’t sad. She was angry. Very very angry. The kind of angry that actually made her chest hurt. The kind of angry that made men stab things.

Florence set up the menu wipe board again, the specials drawn out in a swirling green marker:

Strange Fruit Special: soft boiled eggs, white toast, your choice of meat. $5.99.

Grace left her twenty bucks, then hustled out into the dark night.

#

Rashida Covington, Channel Seven Action News was on hand when Senator Collux arrived at his offices one morning. She was there to get a statement on the Kayleigh Bent case from the senator before he got to his office and had a chance to prepare some straight-laced rhetoric. The senator sounded at his craziest when he was shooting from the cuff, and as much as she was supposed to be impartial, Rashida wanted him to sound crazy. It made up for all the smoothing out he did later. And if she was supposed to be revealing the truth, then that was what she needed—the crazy. Because that’s what he was—crazy.

Better to think him crazy than evil, though the latter was slowly gaining in Rashida’s personal opinion.

The senator was mounting the steps to his constituency office by the time she caught up with him. He had a cup of Starbucks in one hand and an iPad in the other. Rashida glanced at her cameraman to make sure he was behind her, and then she sprinted for it, dodging two aides bogged down with briefcases and laptop bags. They’d just gotten in from the capitol the night before. Now was a great time for a comment.

“Senator,” she called, “Senator, just a moment of your time. I’m Rashida Covington, from Merrimack Channel Seven Action News.”

The senator about-faced on hearing the name of a television news station, and plastered his smile on. She wondered if he knew what she was going to ask about. She was a woman, so he had to suspect it. “Miss Covington, it’s always a pleasure.” Rashida would have been offended if she hadn’t heard it from him about five times before.

“Senator, there’s a growing concern among the female demographic, that the gallows pole will be used in the case of Kayleigh Bent, the eighteen-year-old on trial for the violation of the Personhood Act. What are your thoughts on the matter?”

If Rashida had expected him to be taken aback by her question, she would have been disappointed. Sure it was early, and he could still go off message, but his staff had probably been coaching him all the way over in the car. He was up for re-election next year—he couldn’t afford to have a hair or quote out of place.

“Kayleigh Bent is just one in a nest of vicious criminals who are abducting women and aborting their children,” the senator said, looking at the camera and not at her. Only politicians did that—looked at the camera instead of the interviewer. It made Rashida hate him more.

“So you don’t feel the execution and display of a teenager’s body in the city is, some might say, a grotesque use of excessive governmental force?” Inside Rashida wondered if she’d just put herself on a list somewhere. Was there a list? She didn’t want to ever find out.

The senator had resumed his brisk walk inside, leaving Rashida and the cameraman and the rest of his aides to scramble after him. He was, after all, as he liked to remind people often, a very tall man, much like Abraham Lincoln.

“This is why the gallows pole will be instituted,” the senator said confidently over his shoulder.. “These people sow violence. They don’t regret that violence. The only thing they might understand is a body. So we’ll give them one.”

At that moment there was a scream, and an aide ran from the interior of the senator’s office, hands in front of her face. She tripped over a dip in the worn marble flooring and sprawled, face-down.

Rashida motioned the cameraman to keep rolling, but that was pointless, because he was a professional. He wasn’t going to stop until the senator was out of sight.

Two of the man with Collux ran forward to help the woman to her feet, but all she could do was scream. They lowered her to the steps that led up to the second floor and one of them flipped open his cell, ready to call for assistance.

The other two aides ran for the office, for obviously there was something wrong in there, Rashida took advantage of the general chaos to follow them and the senator into the reception area, and then back to his office.

“Oh my god,” mumbled the aide in front of Rashida, almost blocking her way, but then he stumbled and had to sit down on a chair arm, and she could see the senator’s desk, a large expansive slab of mahogany on brass legs. More of a table, really. There were no desk drawers. A man like Collux probably didn’t have to keep anything in drawers.

Seated in the desk chair was a woman. She was posed, actually, in an upright position, wrapped in the state flag. One of her hands was laid flat on the desk surface. The other settled over her breasts, palm over her heart. Her eyes stared straight at Rashida, and it took a moment for her to understand that they were dead eyes.

Just above her, scrawled across the wall in foot high letters, someone had painted a message in red, possibly the woman’s blood:

I WAS TOO AFRAID OF THE LAW TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL.

“Jesus Christ!” the senator shouted, obviously not thinking that he was going out to hundreds upon thousands of homes over the airwaves. “Someone call security.”

Rashida stared at the woman in the chair. There was no indication of what had happened to her—no stab wounds or gunshot holes. The sign made it painfully clear that she’d died in one of the abortion mobiles. Rashida herself didn’t use them, didn’t even use birth control (the station tested them all for drugs every month), but it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. She was on her last packet of condoms, and once they were gone, she wasn’t sure what she would do. Not have sex, she guessed.

Like that would ever work.

One of Collux’s less squeamish aides seemed to realize that there was a running camera there, and he herded them out, his arms wide. “Come on, folks, let’s give the woman some dignity.”

Rashida turned to her cameraman, Larry. “Did you get that?”

Larry patted the digital camera. “Everything, even the rigor mortis.” He frowned. “But we won’t be able to show it.”

Rashida wondered if they would ever learn the woman’s name. Probably not. An aide was heading towards them as they walked to the front doors of the building, but Larry had already palmed the flash card from the camera, and when the aid confiscated the card now in place, he’d just get a blank chip. Larry was a good man.

“No,” she agreed. “We won’t.”

But that didn’t mean that she wasn’t going to leak it anyway.

#

The red and white armbands arrived in the mail. Every woman in the state of Virginia received one. It must have cost a fortune to send them all, but there they were on every doorstep, as if they appeared in synchronization. The postal workers who carried them to each and every door trembled with excitement as they laid them out. Sooner or later someone would be home when they delivered, and they’d get to see one opened.

It hadn’t escaped anyone’s notice that all of the packages were addressed to women. They’d been x-rayed at the postal office, to make sure that they weren’t carrying contraband (in the early days before the mandatory drug testing, women had tried to get their friends to mail them pills from out-of-state).

Mei-Yun Cheng unwrapped the parcel with bated breath. Her friend Kay had gotten hers yesterday, and she had wanted to see it for herself.

Her birth control delivery was due next week, but she was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to receive it. No one had gotten pills in two weeks, if the sauna gossip was to be believed, not since the body had been discovered at the senator’s office. Mei-Yun had seen the video on you-tube before it had been pulled by the state.

Melanie Stern had been kidnapped and had a pregnancy terminated “against her will” the other day, so that was still going on, Mei-Yun thought with some relief. But as she stared at the package in her hands, and then unfocused her eyes to look beyond them, to the televisions screen and the picture of Kayleigh Bent’s corpse hanging from the gallows pole, she wondered how long it would last. People were still elected, right? They could change things through the power of voting. These things went in cycles, and eventually people would have enough and start to make changes. She just wondered if she could hang on long enough for her son to get a good education before they moved somewhere else. Maybe back to China.

She had thought that the second they’d dropped Kayleigh Bent’s corpse down on the rope and it had bounced there before stilling in the windless morning, the public outcry would force them to cut it down. But no one had said anything. For the last three days, the corpse had been shown on the television in thirty second clips once every two hours. It was impossible to get around. She’d gotten to the point where she didn’t even bother to shield Tian’s eyes when he was watching television. He was three now, but by the time he understood what he was seeing, it would probably be worse all around.

She listened to her heart thudding in her chest while she opened the inner wrapper, a bit of pink tissue paper, it didn’t matter. She wondered about the person who had sent all these, how they had sent them all, if they had made them all. It was obvious that they had been handmade, or at least not factory made.

There it was, this little band of red and white, meant to be fitted over a shirt, a jacket, a coat, whatever she was wearing. In a time before this, such an armband would have meant that someone had it in for her, and they wanted everyone to know it.

Finally, wrapped in that circle of cloth, a pink paper heart with typeset words on it, reading:

HELLO THERE. WE HEARD U NEED THIS.
DON’T WORRY, WE LOVE YOU.
EVERY PART OF YOU BELONGS TO YOU.

“What the hell is that?” Qiáng said, looking over her shoulder. Mei-Yun crushed the card in her hand, but the letters seemed to burn through and touch her skin. She took the arm band and tucked it into her pocket, where it would wait, until she knew if she was ready for what it wanted her to do.

#

“Where’s your armband?” Carla asked her friend when she saw her in the grocery store.

Sharon stared at Carla’s red and white armband. “Birth control is illegal,” she said matter-of-factly.

“No one’s making you take any,” Carla said, her face making an expression that looked like this: O_o.

They stood there like that for a while, Sharon looking uncomfortable, and Carla looking like an emoticon. Then Sharon shrugged and glanced at the display of douches. She wanted to buy one, but she didn’t think she should in front of Carla. “Well,” she said. “Um.”

Carla shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, and then waved a little before pushing her cart away, down the aisle. Sharon watched her pass the other cart and its user, Penelope Gallagher, whom Sharon knew from church but didn’t know very well. She did see Penelope had on an armband. It was as if they had sprung out of nowhere overnight. Now Sharon felt like she was the only one not wearing one. Well, the only woman. By this time, though, even some men were wearing them. They were mostly younger men.

But it was a silly thing to do, this protest that just made them all out to be whiners and manipulators (as if this whole celibacy thing would last long), and Sharon didn’t believe in either of those, either. Though last night, the news had reported that even the streetwalkers were staying in.

There were plenty of reasons these things were outlawed—look at the estrogen in the water, for god’s sake—and they lived in a republic where people elected the officials who made these laws. That was the way the world was.

If they didn’t like it, then maybe they should all move to Canada, or Finland or something, she thought bitterly as she stared at the armband of the woman scanning her groceries. The woman, whose name tag read “Sissy,” didn’t say anything to her, but every once in a while her eyes cut to Sharon’s left bicep, where her armband would be, or, as it was obvious to Sissy, should be.

Sissy watched her slide her card and submit to the retinal scan, then handed her the receipt. “Have a nice day,” she said, but it sounded like this: “Hahaveevevnaanbitch.” Then she dissolved into a series of hacking coughs and had to grab for a tissue to cover her mouth, so Sharon wasn’t sure if she had heard the woman correctly or not.

No matter. You turn the other cheek. You can’t let the little things bother you. You are not responsible for other people’s reactions, Sharon Graham, she told herself, pushing her cart out to her car.

It didn’t make her happy to not be on the wagon train like all her girlfriends, but the whole armband thing made her uneasy. She felt more uneasy when she passed the display gallows on her way home. Kayleigh Bent’s body still hung from the pole like a drenched flag, arm bands tied all over her legs. They had appeared there over time, the news said, along with flowers and cards and signs. Someone had spray painted on the wall behind her head, Keep on keeping on. Now there was a guard on the body so that they could make sure that it wasn’t tampered with.

No one could link the arm band to any crime, and just wearing the arm band wasn’t a sign of guilt, really. This was a free country after all, and if they let Jews wear those yarmulkes or Muslim women wear headscarves, then women were allowed to wear the armbands. As long as they didn’t do anything.

Kayleigh’s feet clacked together in a strong gust of wind.

Sharon forgot all about her when she thought about dinner for that evening. A nice roast. Yes, a nice roast was the thing for today. And after that, she’d sit down and work. She had five houses on the market, and they wouldn’t sell themselves, and most certainly not in this economy.

She sat at a red light and contemplated the graffiti sprayed on the wall of the pharmacy on the corner:

ILU-486

(2/20/12)

————-
ETA: Hello there! I am glad that this story is getting some play! I’m starting to reach the max cap for responding to comments, so if don’t get to you, I am sorry. (SADFAYCE). But if you want to link to this story or tweet it or FB it or [insert social media platform] it, feel free. I guess when I pubbed it, I lost control of who sees it, and that’s okay with me.

INSERT OBLIGATORY PSA HERE! For more information or to see how you can help in the fight for women’s reproductive rights in the US:

http://sparkrj.org/content/

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/

I am sure there are other places too, but those were the ones I liked when I went a’looking.

ETA 2: You can now buy the shirt! All proceeds go to Planned Parenthood. Thanks for your support!

Upon contemplating writing this letter to you, I was rather nervous about what you might think of it. I had pondered what you might think of me should I say something you mighn’t like, or what your secretarial staff (if you have one) might think of its contents. Then I remembered that you are in fact dead, and that took most of the pressure off.

Until recently, I had never really read any of your work. Sorry about that. There are many things to read in the world, some of it good, a great deal of it crap, and I confess that I read a lot of crap. I am not sorry about reading crap, however, because it’s all been made by someone, and reading trash fulfills some sort of human need, I would suppose.

As I said, I hadn’t read much of your work. I had once read your short story about Edison’s dog, and that was rather novel. I also spent three years teaching “Harrison Bergeron” to ninth grade English classes, and while I quite enjoyed it, it didn’t make me seek anything of yours out, not even when I saw Nick Nolte in Mother Night, which I confess made me fall asleep.

Last year I read your short essays and the like that you put out a few years ago, shortly before you died. I remembered liking it, though I was rather sad for you because you seemed really upset. This is not to say that you didn’t have things to be upset about. I am often upset at things whenever I poke my head out of the hole I jam myself into and call a home, which is why I do my best to see my shadow and dart back in all the time. It’s not the sun that makes me do this. It’s NPR. Still.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to keep reading your work because, in fact, it was rather depressing in the sense that I identified with your dismay and general disgust for the world as a whole, and in my limited experience on this earth, I have learned that hanging about with other people like me only tends to make me worse. But I did like your rather happy ideas about talking to people, because people are in general fun and worth knowing, on the one-to-one ratio. As someone who in my youth used to idolize misanthropes such as HL Mencken (whom I have also never read, which tells you much about my symbolic infatuation), this was a novel idea. So I began to experiment with the idea that people might actually be worth talking to.

I gave it a try. In the past fifteen stores I have visited, I have struck up more than passing “thank you have a nice day” conversations with the clerks and other people waiting in line with me. About anything—potatoes, stickers, weather, scarves, coats I think are adorable. Hairstyles I think are pretty. Shoes that are great. The general sense of camaraderie one gets waiting in line at the post office for an hour before the Christmas Holiday. And you were right. In every instance, I felt a little better about the universe, or at least, I realized that I was part of something as a whole, and not surrounded by idiots. Idiots run in packs called societies. People run in individual universes that are, on a whole, worth visiting.

I am sure that there are exceptions to this rule. Just the other day I made stabby eyes at a lady blocking two pumps at the four-pump gas station. I did not feel the need to talk with her. And perhaps if I had, I might have felt better about her relative nonchalance at inconveniencing a line of cars waiting to be fed. But I was not in a mood.

I take pills for this kind of thing. Most of the time they work just fine. I understand you took pills, too.

I don’t know what compelled me to pick up Slaughterhouse Five, but at some point in the past two months I must have said to myself that I needed to give it a try. So I checked it out of the library and started down that path to find out what he hell everyone was talking about.

I liked Slaughterhouse Five, enough that I read Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mister Rosewater. Last night I finished Breakfast of Champions and read a few of your short stories, like “Welcome to the Monkey House” and “Fortitude,” which really, Mr. Vonnegut, was fucking depressing. I think that might have been your intent. But after I finished every single book, I set it down in my lap and thought about it for a few moments, and I guess that has to mean something.

I’d be rambling on and on if I tried to talk about the contents of the books themselves. I haven’t read any of your other books, and I am not sure that I want to. Your works are depressing, really, in some ways, and I know you knew that, but still. I only take 20 mgs of Prozac every day, and I don’t want to have to amp it up just for you.

Having said that I will tell you that I adored them. I adored Kilgore Trout and all of his stories and novels. He makes me want to write a short story where everyone on the planet works in a call center, and all the other work is done by robots. That way everyone spends their days just calling up everyone else, and the money they make convincing people to buy things they in turn spend on things other people convince them to buy. I don’t know the end of this story because I am still living in the middle of it.

I loved Billy Pilgrim, and I wasn’t that fond of the narrator from Cat’s Cradle, who I am told is named John, but I must have missed that part. I loved Billy the Poet, though in this day and age, my generation might call that story “a little rapey”. I don’t know if one can have only a little rape, but there it is.

I also loved the way your stories are science fiction, but not. I say that because as long as I can remember I have generally not liked science fiction. I don’t really care to read about space, aliens or anything in space, unless it’s written by Joss Whedon or there are lightsabers involved. Perhaps I don’t like to think about space because it makes me think about our finite resources here on earth, and that leads me to think about how we are all going to die in our own filth. I might have something to do with the fact that I think we are all doomed. Maybe science fiction, for me, then is a big wish list of things I never think we will have, like hope, and exploration, and a future. But there it is.

But most of all, Mr. Vonnegut, you write science fiction in a way that made me think of my own work, because writers are horribly vain and must compare everything they read to what they write, even if it is just to say, “I don’t use as many semicolons” with a smug air, or secretly whisper in their head, “I will never write again” after reading something quite compelling.

A few times after reading things you had written, I said to myself “I will never write again”. Then again.

For the last few months I had been feeling sorry for myself that a great deal of the fiction I write doesn’t seem to have a home. It’s not horrible enough for horror, or it’s too crazy for mainstream. It’s got everyday people doing things like working at Wal-Mart in it, and while society talks about how they like that stuff, they only want to see it if at the end of the story the person gets a promotion and is finally able to make a living wage. They are less enthused about the Wal-Mart worker whose head is crushed by a ladder. I would complain about their lack of vision, but I sense that this is just another version of my own fear of NPR.

So I have been writing to spec. And it’s not going well, Sir. It’s not going well at all, because I could care less about some of the things that presses are asking for. I am sure that someone out there has great ideas that for those prompts, but I am not one of them. Or if i am, I am not able to produce it on the time-table that is required. And so it goes.

But, ‘I like your writing’ is the gist of this letter. I like the way everything doesn’t tie together at the end, except for when it does. I like that Eddie Key, who drove the mobile disaster unit at the end of Breakfast of Champions was both related to Francis Scott Key and had family that owned Bluebird Farm. I like that Eliot Rosewater was Billy Pilgrim’s roommate. I like the albeit sad story of how Billy Pilgrim’s wife died. I like that for a while I wanted to be a Bokononist. I liked that in the end of everything, Kilgore Trout wanted to be young again. Because, yeah.

It is with a bit of embarrassment that I admit I wasn’t aware of the bombing of Dresden, and so I have decided to do a little more reading, because I feel like I owe you that much. I am sorry that you had to see that, that anyone had to see it or feel it. And my new-found sorry-ness is probably your fault, even though I am applying it to all kinds of things.

The other day I stood in line behind an older lady in the donut shop. She bought an extraordinary amount of donuts. Four boxes of them. I was starting to feel irritated that she was being so slow. Every donut she bought was different, and she had to select them all by name. Finally, when her boxes were bagged up, she said to the counter girl, “I will have to make two trips, because my back isn’t good.” The girl said okay, and then sort of belatedly offered to carry them out with the lady.

“You don’t have a coat on,” the lady said to the girl as she rounded the counter.

It occurred to me that I did have a coat on. “I’ll take them.”

And so I carried the donuts out to the car for the lady, who was impeccably dressed, with perfectly coiffed hair that was dyed unnaturally black. She was driving a Hyundai. I might have helped her because she was Asian, and she reminded me of my grandmother-in-law.

“My husband is in a nursing home, and I’m taking donuts to all the nurses there,” she told me. And just like that I realized that it was worth it, this trip out in the cold with two boxes of donuts that I laid carefully on the floor of the backseat so they wouldn’t fly about. In that moment I had become part of her story as well as my own. I had taken donuts to the nurses, too.

And the lady, I’ll call her Liang-Liang, became part of this letter. So now we’re connected. Sort of. I’ll never see her again, will I? I wonder if it matters.

Somewhere in all of this is a moral, and I know how you hate those, and I’m not bright enough to find it. Maybe it’s open-ended, like ending an essay with a question so that your teacher says, “You never finished!” I used to do that a great deal in college. It always seemed like the right thing to do.

So thank you, Mr. Vonnegut, for something. I don’t know what exactly. It’s sad, and funny, and very pointless, but, you know, there it is.

Amanda