Mislead

Fun On A Real Farm!

For decades this billboard has steered people wrong. The company that owned it went out of business and nobody bothered to paint over the outdated advertisement. The billboard continued to direct tourists to an attraction that had gone under during the Kennedy administration. On average, three hundred people per annum made the weary pilgrimage, guided by the fading image of pastoral fields and cartoonish cows. They drove along rutted dirt roads. They stirred up dust that hung in the still air like ash and bounced over potholes that knocked their suspension out of whack. They reached the end of the long road. The people gaped in disbelief at a dead-end revelation. Splintered rail fence. Meadow choked with knee-high brush. Curtain of fog thicker than woodsmoke.

Good God. Was that the sound of wolves on the breeze?

Welcome to the country, folks.



(This story was excerpted from the collection Little Fictions)

The Woods Where No Kids Play

A story haunted these trees. Remember that man who was killed. A knife was involved. It happened ten years ago. It happened in winter. There was a lot of snow between December and March. The man was killed on the eve of a terrible storm and his body remained undiscovered for almost a month.

The papers described the man, when he was dug out of a drift, as ‘a frozen statue with hands outstretched and face turned toward the sky.’ The journalist who wrote these words felt they were poetic while still performing the task of informing the public.

The man wasn’t from the neighborhood. He wasn’t from the city. He’d been visiting a relative who declined to be interviewed by the press. One of the local television stations tried to get her to say a few words and she closed the door of her house.

For a long while after the incident people talked about how it was to live close by a place where someone had lost his life in a terrible fashion. Some people moved away from the neighborhood. Others stayed, but no longer enjoyed life as they had before.

People told the story and their passion in telling imbued the story with power. This is how they spoke the words of the story. Back in ’75, clench the fists, Stranger in town, pause and hold breath, Went for a walk and never seen alive again, exhale with a long drawn-out sigh.

In a strange sort of way it was a good story. Some stories, they come to an end and you wonder what the point was in hearing them. These are cheating stories. These are stories that rob you of precious time, the one commodity that none of us can buy any more of, not for all the money in the world.

The story about the woods held onto a listener like a gila monster. It was one of the best stories in the neighborhood. The story about the woods and the terrible events of ’75. After hearing this story something deep down changed inside. Hard to say what. Something important. Something vital.

"Faulty"

There are matters of importance and matters that are inconsequential. The former may pretend to be the latter and the latter may be mistaken for the former. The phone bill has gone unpaid again this month. There is a strange lump under your right armpit. Which of these statements is significant and which is trivial? You may think the answer is obvious, but can you trust your judgment? Humans do not consistently function with complete logic; their minds are the product of electro-chemical activity in brains that are lumps of organic material. The brains have evolved the ability to detect patterns and create patterns where none exist. They see a portion of a puzzle and struggle to fill in the missing pieces. What goes in that blank space the brain asks? Should I insert a purring kitten? Should I insert a thermo-nuclear device?

Many of the world’s greatest philosophers consider the brain to be the grand palace of the soul.

Cogito ergo sum.

What does this mean, really?

"Now, Then"

I’m here with you right now, but I’m also fifty years ago. In 1961 I’m at a party, holding a drink and smoking a cigarette. The people around me are talking about work and movies and love affairs. How do you like our new president and his promise to have a man on the moon by decade’s end. What about this place suddenly appearing in the newspapers, this Vietnam wherever it is. Did you like West Side Story. I thought the music was quite good, but thought they should have gotten a Hispanic actress to play Maria. I finish my drink and stub out the cigarette. Someone puts a new record on the phonograph. The act strikes me as wrong, but I can’t say why.

I’m in 1961, but also here with you half a century later at the edge of a vast and darkened field. Rain has come and gone and we can smell wet grass and a hint of autumn. If the clouds clear we’ll be able to see the first of the evening stars. The wind blows cooler and dies away. A few minutes ago something unpleasant happened between us and we came out to the field because a little fresh air might be what we needed to wash the anger from our souls. I can’t tell if anything has gotten better. Maybe I’ve calmed down, but a more truthful statement to make is that I am more confused than calm. You’re here with me and the field stretches out ahead and those clouds aren’t getting any thinner and a drop of rain just hit my cheek and everything about us is dreamlike. The field is a continuation of the argument started back at the house. You hated how my mind was always somewhere else. You wanted to know why I couldn’t change that about myself.

At the edge of the field we hold our breath. We could talk. We could say a lot of words. It’s easier to be silent. I wish the peaceful moment could last a little bit longer.

You Need to Know

One subject that requires addressing is sex. Human existence can bring about many opportunities for romantic interaction, but that doesn’t mean you jump into bed with everyone who makes him/herself available. Human nature tasks us to remove a cookie from the jar, so to speak, but resist the urge to overindulge at every opportunity. Not that copulation is wrong, or wasteful, or sinful, or any other adjective that has little or no meaning to a properly maintained lifestyle. It’s just that the act has an unavoidably draining effect. Research has determined that sexual congress lowers the efficiency of mind and body by as much as three percent. This seems trifling, yes. Still, you must remember: today, right now, may be the very moment when your next breath depends on absolutely razor-sharp mind and reflexes.

It’s definitely something to keep in mind.

Algebra

After the war every acre of farmland for miles around was bought up by a development corporation with an eye toward the future. This was the time to act. This was how you seized an iron from the fire and used it in whatever fashion irons were used. Who needed farms in this age of mechanization? What was farming if not archaic? Though a generous person might consider using the word quaint.

The development company drew up plans. It secured the necessary permits. The time of change arrived. Hundreds of fields were plowed flat. Down went the barns and the silos. Fences were plucked from the soil like weeds. Rambling houses where generations of families had lived, tilling the earth. . .these were mowed down by monstrous tractors and bellowing backhoes. The farms had existed for more than two centuries. And how long did it take to erase them from the world? Days. You’d think maybe longer. But no.

A new crop appeared. It seemed magical. A crop of houses. Wow.

Though not actually magic, of course. Only the feeble-minded believe in such puffery. It was simple economics. The war had come to an end and the returning soldiers wanted somewhere to live. Wanted? They needed. They had gone to war as young men. They’d left the homes of their parents. It wouldn’t do to return to those same homes, those rooms with small beds and postered walls. Even if the soldiers returning from the war wanted to reclaim their childhood rooms. And none of them did.

Economics is largely based on mathematics. Everyone knows that, right?

Consider the war as A. Consider the soldiers as B. C was the life they’d been dreaming about for years while wading through mud and killing the enemy. Consider the enemy as E. So B killed all of E and came home looking for C. They pursued C to the neighborhoods that were once farms. They knew nothing about the ghosts of cows and soy beans. They had their own ghosts with which to contend. These would be the ghosts of E, slain in multitudes on the battlefields of countries far away.

E, truth be told, was also only looking for C. Sadly, E was destined never to find C. This was because they were the bad guys.

B found C. B got married and built families around themselves. Families = F. They had children. These would be G. C watched G grow up and produce grandchildren, H. After a long row of years B used up all of the C that had been allotted them. B waved goodbye to G and H. B exited C and entered the realm of I.

Death = I.

When B entered I, G and H typically moved away, looking for their own version of C. G and H held fond memories of their homes with B. They generally had respect for what B had gone through during A. They were different from B, though. Most of them were never to experience the trials of A. All J knew of A was what they read in books or saw on television. For them A was something that existed on the printed page or in small black-and-white rectangles in living rooms. G and H could never fully comprehend how much B had given during A in order to achieve C and make life possible for them. G and H weren’t being rude or thoughtless. They had their own concerns. There was important business that needed tending.

The era of J had begun.

Adjustments had to be made.

Fifteen First Sentences

Engaging

The sound of distant gunfire reached us at the same time the most beautiful woman in the world began to dance.


Meditative

He told a very small lie to make one day slightly easier, then spent the rest of his life watching that lie swell to the size of the sun.


Melancholy

This morning she first laced on her favorite tennis shoes and second laced herself to the back of the bedroom door.


Thoughtful

She said yes when it should have been no and he laughed when the situation demanded a moment of silence.


Suspenseful

Please she said and he said All right and she held out a dagger and he said Wow I thought you were kidding.


Startling

In the morning, as cool light painted both of their nude bodies pale pink, he could not for the life of him recall why it had seemed a good idea to bring home a woman with eyeballs tattooed on both of her sunken cheeks.


Repetitive

There was a gentleman who walked mildly among his fellow humans, worked mildly at a mild sort of job, married a woman as mild as himself, raised several mild children, and when he died the people around him immediately forgot he had existed, something the gentleman might have found mildly amusing.


Evocative

In the dead still of night he opened a crystal box shaped like a crescent moon and removed an object everyone in the world believed to be pure myth.


Frightening

So here’s where I live the mysterious woman said and the guy she’d picked up earlier in the evening hoped she wasn’t talking about the blood-spattered packing crate by the burned-out car.


Dramatic

When the pickup truck fishtailed she closed her eyes and held tight to the little plastic bag that had gotten them into this terrible mess.


Reflective

Their love would endure forever, so long as forever was defined as seven days, three hours and eleven minutes.


Baffling

Hot dogs contain a sinister and undetectable ingredient known only to the equally sinister and undetectable entities who place it there for purposes none of us will ever know.


Amusing

I thought vampires only came out at night the lonely woman said and the man with the odd teeth and sunglasses said Don’t believe everything you read.


Strange

Things began getting truly out of hand when the people who last week turned into plush ducks began this week to turn into real ones.

Poetic

Floating past the maple tree, heading up into the open sky he couldn’t help but think: This is going to be some kind of day. . .

"The Mathematician's Pen"

He had a favorite pen. Black ink. Smooth wooden barrel. Brass clip decorated with tiny birds. He liked to believe they were cardinals, but the engraving was not very precise. One of the birds appeared to have three wings and the other only one. Both of them had bodies that weren’t completely birdlike, as though the person responsible for the engraving had only possessed a passing knowledge of avian physiology. In spite of that the mathematician loved the pen, how it felt in his hand, how the wood caught light and bent it into pleasing amplitudes. With undeniable pleasure he recalled the buying of the pen. It was a perfect summer day. You couldn’t ask for better weather. Hot, but not too hot. A steady breeze from the west that bore the faint tang of sea salt. The mathematician ate a light breakfast of eggs and toast and spiced tea with milk and sugar. He indulged in a long and leisurely walk through the woods behind his house, not going anywhere in particular, just winding around trees and gazing up at the endless blue sky. The leaves of the trees spoke in a June rustle. The wind whispered its own secrets. The mathematician left the woods and walked into the village and had lunch at a small restaurant by the library. Salad. More tea, iced. He spent an hour in the library, reading magazines and newspapers and then checking out a book on ancient Greek myth. He went to the grocery store down the street from the library. He bought canned soup, a bar of bath soap, a loaf of bread, a small box of chocolate cookies. The pen he found hanging on a cardboard display next to the rack of candy bars and gum. There were about twenty others similar to the pen, but none had wood the color of fine chocolate. The young woman at the register said the pens were on sale, today only. Her eyes were green and went well with the wooden barrel of the pen. Her nails were painted and bitten at the tips. The mathematician wondered what caused such an attractive girl to eat not only her nails but unpleasantly flavored polish and would have asked but the young woman’s smile, perfect as this perfect day, stopped him in his tracks.

Hillbilly Tangent

So it was that Young Lover lived with a gent she called Bear, real name George or Henry or some such, Young Lover didn’t concern herself with such trivia. When they kissed he wasn’t anyone but Bear. It was a name and a description. Bear was huge wine cask of a man. He was a great mass of unruly hair and beard flowing like runaway smoke. His trmendous hands wrapped around Young Thing and with anyone else she might have been afraid, but with Bear she felt nothing but security, plain and simple.

The winter of ‘83 Young Lover and Bear shacked up in a trailer by Lake Onawanda, they screwed by day and drank rotgut scotch by night. They lived like life was about to be outlawed. Plenty of booze, plenty of dope, plenty of soul. Young Lover couldn’t help thinking Not bad for a girl just turned eighteen. This is a decent way to spend her precious time.

The night Bear died Young Lover was sipping malt liquor and watching a rerun of the Beverly Hillbillies on television. Bear had half a thousand hits of grade-A acid in his shirt pocket and one still stuck to the underside of his tongue. He was dream-driving, floating through a hallucinogen haze. There was the purple glowing moon and the stars that spelled arcane messages across orange heavens. He cranked the steering wheel for a better view. The truck fishtailed and flew, with splendid grace, through a guardrail.

Bear entered the waiting arms of a gully three hundred feet deep.

Young Lover collapsed on the couch and laughed.

I just love that Jethro she said and glanced around instinctively for Bear to either agree or disagree.

Belief System

A religious zealot, hand-lettered sign on a stick. Make ye your soul be cleansed. Filthy robe. Ragged sandals. The zealot gesticulates awkwardly and chants in a secret language. Man or woman, impossible to determine. What brought the zealot here today. What inner voice provided direction. Where will the voice tell the zealot to go next. Will the voice provide instructions for a new sign to match the new destination. Will the words be as stilted and archaic.

The zealot waves at the bright morning sky and smiles inexplicably. Who did this person used to be before going mad. Where was this person’s family. Isn’t there someone out there to keep a leash on him. If it is a him. If it makes any difference once you lose your mind.

Coffee Can

In the evening her man friend goes off to do something with someone. Do what. With whom. Is it another lover. Is it an illegal activity. She doesn’t know, the man friend has his own agenda, he doesn’t bother keeping her in the loop. She has the apartment to herself, she sits on the bathroom floor and pries up a certain plank in the corner. The plank is slippery and mildewed. From the space underneath she removes a rusty coffee can. Tonight another handful of coins is added to the contents of the can. Tonight a few metallic clinks, last night a few, tomorrow night a few. Few and few and few and eventually the can filled to the brim and magnificently heavy in her hand. These are bits of copper and silver scoured from street gutters or taken from pockets of drunks in the bar where she works. The man friend has no idea about the plank or the can, otherwise the coins would go away and the saving would start again. The man friend is more or less without scruples. He tends to his needs first and hers a distant second. It is what it is. The can is the can. The money inside is the money. When she has enough it will be possible to buy a bus ticket to somewhere other than this city where there is no man friend and no one like him. The ticket will be printed on paper. The paper is the paper. Slowly she adds today’s coins. Today is twelve clinks, which isn’t thirteen or twenty or fifty, but also isn’t six or three or zero.

A pretty good night after all.

Seagulls

Outside the city are the fields. At the far edge of the fields there stretches a desert. The desert is bordered by mountains, and beyond them lies the gray and restless sea. The sea reaches for another shore. Who lives here in this unfamiliar land. The enemy. Not like us, not good like us. Not decent or fearful of the holy powers. These are terrible creatures undeserving of breath and blood. If the sea were to boil forth and drown the enemy once and for all. If justice should be served. But the sea does not care. Good versus evil. To salt water the concepts are interchangeable.

Ashen gulls hang by invisible strings on the acrid breeze. They scream and fling themselves down in search of fish. They know little about the shore behind or the one ahead. Gulls are not truly alive, they are illusions of the ocean sun. Spun like dirty silk from the haze and set to motion by deep hidden forces older then the earth itself. Who can honestly claim to have touched a gull and felt its down, its beak, its claw. Anyone says he has, that person is a liar.

Searcher

I remember seeing this dead woman once, I was dropping a letter into the corner post box and the dead woman came out of an alley pushing a rusted shopping cart with crooked wheels. The cart pulled her to the right and the left. The dead woman fought to control the cart. A better way to say is that she struggled with the cart. The best way is to say she warred with the cart.

Suddenly the dead woman stopped and looked all around.

Where is it she said.

Where is what I asked.

I’ve misplaced the damned thing.

Something fell from the cart?

I had it. I had it and now it is gone.

When did you lose it?

The dead woman made a strange sound.

I didn’t know what the dead woman lost, she never explained, she appeared to think I already knew every detail of her misfortune. She swung her head awkwardly, scanning. She began to weep and I almost offered to help look for whatever had gone missing. But it was getting late and I had things to do and the moment to offer aid passed. The dead woman began to speak quietly to herself in a language I didn’t recognize. She got down on her knees and crawled into gutter. She picked up loose change and discarded cigarettes and soiled bits of paper and held each item and sighed.

Another moment came and went. I couldn’t say what kind.

The dead woman crawled along the gutter. The dead woman crawled to the corner. The dead woman turned left and crawled out of my sight and that was all the time the dead woman and I would ever share.

Still. Some nights I dream of her. There she is, wandering though the vapors. I have questions for the dead woman. Did she ever locate her missing treasure? Was she still out there crawling in the darkness of the soulless city? Had she worn out the flesh of her knees? Was she scuffing along on bare bone?

I have questions for myself. If the woman was dead, then how could it be possible for her to return to life? And if she lived anew should I really consider her as having been dead in the first place?

“----------“

She opened a dusty box on a shelf at the back of her thoughts, she revealed to the love of her life a closely guarded secret, one locked deep inside for many years, I am ---------- she said, and ---------- was a word she feared to speak, and ---------- had long caused great shame, never in decades had she been free of being ----------, ---------- was how she identified herself, ---------- was a small agony firmly anchored to her soul, the only thing conceivably worse than being ---------- was to be *******, which is what the love of her life chose to reveal about himself.
In fact, I’m proud of it he said, and she knew not how to respond.

Roadmap

The veins in the back of his hand, thick and twisted and shadowed blue. Move across the wrist past a gnarl of ancient broken bone. Advance along the forearm and a constellation of moles. Lost temporarily within a forest of grey hair. Reappear again at a swollen elbow. Flank the scar shaped like a wingless bird. Vanish beneath the sleeve of the shirt he threw on before storming out the door and after saying to her four absolutely unforgiveable words.

Catching Up

At 11:33, shaking and exhausted, he finally went to bed. His habit was to end the day no later than 9:00. All right. 9:15 if a particularly good book had his attention. 9:30 at the very latest. But this evening a veritable parade of distractions kept him up long past a decent hour. Stopped-up toilet begging to be plunged. Phone call from sister. Neighbor and neighbor’s wife carrying on a drunken argument on their front lawn. Forget 9:15. Forget 9:30. 10:00 came and went, then 11:00. 11:10. 11:20. Only at 11:27 was he able to brush his teeth, drag on pajamas and collapse into bed.

Find a comfortable position under the blanket.

Reach out with one hand and snap off the lamp on the night table.

The clock by the lamp wearily blinked an unhappy message.

11:31.

11:31.

11:31.

11:32. . .

11:33 saw the onset of unconsciousness. 2 hours and 33 minutes late. Blame the toilet. Blame the sister and the neighbors. 2 hours and 33 minutes behind schedule. Was there anything he hated more than being behind schedule?

Little comfort that a cool and dim-lit day would dawn when he could catch up on this lost bit of sleep, forever.

Drive

He went out to the car and found his ex in the front seat listening to a song from back when. The song seemed familiar, but the title danced away from his recollection. The ex, she wasn’t going anywhere, so when he went for a drive it wasn’t alone.

I didn’t expect to see you again he said.

I need some money his ex said.

How much.

Whatever you can spare.

I can maybe give you twenty.

Forty would be better.

Twenty’s what I can afford.

The ex slumped in her seat. OK OK she said. OK OK.

They headed in the direction of downtown. The sky turned storm-green. The wind picked up. Blobs of pollen whirled past the windshield like lost birds. A scrap of paper blew in one window out the other. At the atm by the liquor store he withdrew twenty and the ex put it in her purse and he waited to see, all right now, and she made no move to get out of the car.

Let’s keep on driving the ex said.

Where to he said.

See where the road takes us.

Which would have sounded fun, like an adventure, if not for all the times he’d been down the road she meant and ended up exactly nowhere.

Minutes later they passed a house with a swaybacked roof and leaning garage.
I used to cut grass at this place he said, slowing the car to a crawl. A lady on crutches lived there. She lost her feet in an industrial accident. She used to sit on the porch and yell about being a cripple. How her stumps hurt. How everyone always wanted to help when she didn’t want it and ignored her when she did. She wouldn’t shut up. I’d hear her over the lawn mower engine.

When did you ever cut grass the ex wanted to know.

Back in high school. I didn’t do it long. I’d see these guys who’d been cutting lawns a few years and they weren’t alive anymore. The sun beat them down. Their hands were stained green from picking up grass cuttings. I didn’t want to turn into that and got a job in a garage.

I remember those wrenches of yours.

Gone. Them and that job are history.

He stopped the car and got out and opened the door for his ex and they waded through kneehigh weeds to the rear of the house. During the previous winter or perhaps the one before a birch tree had fallen against the garage. The windows of both the garage and the house were missing. The storm was getting close. Flash of light. Count one two three four. Here came the thunder.

His ex dug through her purse for a cigarette and lit up. She exhaled soft smoke and the scent whisked him off to a place he’d thought locked up and forgotten.

I hate summer he said and pretended, not for the first time, to be the only human being left in the world.

"These Ones"

Who are they, drifting into our camp by the lake. Appearing from the woods and wandering through a maze of shabby tents and filthy sleeping bags. Stepping around a hundred small fires. Day and day and day again. They come and they come. The one who waves hello to everyone he sees. The one who keeps her mouth covered with a hand. The one with weary eyes. The one with many nervous tics. The one who peels off his clothes and dives deep into the lake. The one who sits on a stone by a blackberry bush and picks off berries and feeds them to squirrels. The one who writes in the dirt with her fingernail. The one who claims God has a plan. The one who laughs at the notion that a higher power can possibly be at the wheel. The one who goes a little mad, then a lot mad, then seems normal again, but isn’t, not really. The one who walks to the center of the camp and dances in tight circles. The one with two hats on her head, pink and the bright yellow. The one, I think he’s a man, but so old who can tell, just loose skin and white wispy hair and so many wrinkles it’s hard to make out a human face. The one who smiles and smiles and smiles, then lies down under a tree and stops breathing. The one with a limp, who says he was born lame, the limp used to be much worse, it has steadily gotten better the further west he’s walked, maybe if he travels far enough his gait will completely heal. The one who can’t stop looking over his shoulder, but never explains what terrifying entity haunts the rear. The one with red hair tied into dirty knots. The one with hair that is no definable color. The tall one. The short one. The one so thin she seems transparent. The one who talks to himself with a variety of unique voices. The one who nods quietly and seems so wise it makes me hurt deep down in a way that defies description.

These ones. I used to hear people use the phrase, maybe hundreds of times, and always wanted to ask them hey what’s wrong with you, these ones doesn’t make any sense, a plural describing a singular, can’t you see the obvious contradiction of terms. There is no these. There are only ones. We are all ones. We are all part of a great unseen whole that moves towards a common fate. Proper grammar isn’t the issue. There are matters of much more importance.

Yesteryear

A long while back I lived in a crazy part of town, populated by artists and musicians and drug addicts and thieves, maybe the thieves weren’t crazy, they had business to conduct is all, business isn’t crazy, business is business. The others, though, they were clearly insane. Don’t tell me artists and musicians aren’t as bad as drug addicts. All of them are out of their heads. I was probably out of my head living down there in the gutters with the rest of them. I didn’t have much money, so that maybe counted as an excuse. I don’t know. Humans come up with a lot of reasons for their failings. How was I any better than the rest of them. Not by a long shot.

There was a pub where I took my nightly drink. End of a twisted and dirty street. No name, that pub. No sign, even. Everyone in the neighborhood understood what the place was, they pushed through the screen door and sat in the dimness and filled themselves with whatever the bartender had to sell. Beer, homemade wine. Whiskey on special occasions, where it came from was anyone’s guess. One night the pub burned down, a candle left unattended the most likely culprit. We almost lost the whole damn neighborhood with the pub, it was a hell of a bonfire, the devil would have felt right at home. The pub went, the buildings on either side went. The grungy squatters in the buildings went. The bartender didn’t make it out of the conflagration. She ended up on the roof, trying to decide whether or not to jump and die on the cobblestones or wait for the flames to gobble her up along with the rafters and shingles. She waited so long the roof gave way and made the decision for her.

Don’t ask me if the poor bartender was one of the crazies. I would probably have done the same thing.

August

She hated the name Lish, it reminded her of failed poets and Victorian school teachers. She said that he must hate her for having such an old fashioned name, but he said not really and smiled and she went back to making coffee. It was late afternoon and late summer and he’d come home late from work and she was late in a different way and worried and unhappy and not in the mood for coffee or dinner or anything, really. What she wanted was not to be. For a little while. If that were possible. If she had the ability to temporarily deactivate herself. If, by some benevolent manifestation of fate, she could locate the off switch.

Through the open kitchen window she heard the hot wind roaming through a garden that had never quite managed to do more than make weeds. The sunlight looked brittle. She imagined it fracturing. What a lousy name she said. I mean, Alicia. Who names their child Alicia in this day and age. What the hell were my parents thinking. You give a kid a name and it should serve as a guide for life. Tell me anyone named Alicia who amounted to a hill of beans.

He went to the stove and got the coffee pot. He poured two cups and added cream to them both.

What about that cool woman from the Fantastic Four.

The invisible one?

No, the Thing’s girlfriend. The blind sculptress.

What’s cool about being blind. What has a blind person ever accomplished.

How about Helen Keller. Stevie Wonder.

Sure, them. Two people in all of history.

How about Homer.

Homer who she said, weary and confused.

He laughed, absolutely the wrong path to take at that moment.

Shaking his head in frustration she went off to the bedroom, forgetting about coffee and whatever might next be said.