The Last Woman on Earth

This story was inspired by an online game of Scrabble with a good friend of mine during the Great Pandemic of 2020. The words we played are capitalized.

The television was on. He stumbled into the living room, bleery-eyed. 

“Someday,” the news anchor said, “Someday we’ll do all the things we did before.”  

He crouched down inches away from the TV and stared at the date on the crawler. How the fuck had this happened? They’d done it and he'd missed it. He was in lockdown and there was no going home.

Okay, don't worry, RAJ thought, someday soon he’d go back to his apartment, his job, his life. Someday he’d OWN the streets again and go back to all his haunts. He’d RE-ENTER BARS as the king, the man who survived this HEX. Until then, he had to DOZE in this PIG’s DIGS.

“It’s cold in here,” he said.

“Just wait. The furnace will kick on soon. It HEATS up fast.”

He hadn’t been looking at her apartment when they’d first arrived. Now he took a good look around. VASES galore, filled with fake flowers; flowered curtains, a flowered sofa, and a flowered pattern on the area rug. He could almost smell the rotting roses and it was making his stomach LURCH.

In sharp contrast to the floral theme, her walls were grey, like a MINED pit. A visual antacid. All this place needed, he thought, were bars on the window and this’d be a straight up QUOD. She caught him staring.

“It’s called SHALY,” she said, gesturing at the wall. “Like, something shaly.”

That explained everything.

“You wanna watch a movie? Take your pick. I’m going to make cocoa.” She ballooned off to what was presumably the kitchen.

He looked through her predictably RomCom-heavy collection, and picked out an Adam Sandler movie. He waited for her machine to read the DISK.

She came back in with a tray and set it down on the coffee table. She handed him a mug then asked if he liked OAT TRIPE* and he sprayed whipped cream everywhere. She laughed.

“It’s chocolate and Oreo cookie mousse but it’s got oats in it so it’s healthy. I eat it for breakfast sometimes.”

“What’s tripe got to do with it? That’s a cow’s fucking brains.”

“No it isn’t. It’s the first or second stomach of a cow. Any ruminant really.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh.” She didn’t pick up on sarcasm. “I saw it on Jeopardy.”

She dabbed some whipped cream off the table with her fingers then picked up the movie case.

“’Happy Gilmore’?” she said reproachfully, sucking a fingertip. “Isn’t that a GOLFS movie?”

Golfs, for fuck’s sake. It’s your movie, it was on your shelf he wanted to scream at her. He muttered “Don’t gimme any of your BITCH LIP fatso” a little too loudly.

“It’s GOOD FLAB,” she said. “You liked it last night.”

Ah. Last night. He’d been full of VIM then, as his grandfather, that old pussy magnet, would have said with a wink. That enormous ass of hers had been a challenge, like humping a YAK.

Last night was supposed to end with him not falling asleep. Last night was supposed to be about waiting for her to pass out from all the wine and with him tip-toeing out of her room and out of her life. Last night was supposed to be about the UNACTED, the things he hadn’t done YET.

He thought he had till Sunday but as he’d learned on the news, the government had shuttered everything and everyone as of 1 a.m. Saturday morning and, at that particular moment, he’d been balling her. And now he was stuck with her. For the foreseeable future, she was the last woman on EARTH. He drank the cocoa.

She watched the emotions play across his face and when he sipped his drink she went back to the kitchen for the mousse, her hand gripped around the pill bottle in her house coat pocket.



*Seriously, this is a thing, but to paraphrase Tina Turner, "What's tripe got to do, got to do with it?"  https://cookpad.com/us/recipes/4901241-oats-tripe-chocolate-mousse

Number Twenty-Three

Originally published Summer 1998 issue of Northern Fusion

The smog wasn’t too bad today. Thanks to a heavy rainfall two days before the chemicals in the air had been damped down. Usually the atmosphere was so thick it was like walking through fog. John adjusted the setting on his mask from heavy to medium. He couldn’t ever remember a time when it had been set on light.

The concrete sidewalks were falling apart and what few trees lined the streets were leafless, the smaller limbs long since broken off for fuel or shelter. He hated walking to his appointments but, as usual, the two vehicles allotted the Health Department were in for repair.

John removed the clipboard from the side pocket of the metal briefcase he carried and double checked the address of his next assignment. He quickly spotted it: the number twenty-three was scrawled on the front door in dripping red paint. The house, made of slabs of crumbling concrete, with a rutted corrugated tin roof and a pitted metal door, looked like something a couple of kids might have thrown together as a fortress.

He hefted the case to get a better grip and started up the littered walkway, picking his way through the rocks piled haphazardly along the sides. He rapped his fist on the door and a creaky voice called out “Who’s there?”

“Health Department!” he barked. He hated yelling but it was the only way to make himself heard through his mask.

There were sounds of furniture being moved then the door swung open and a wrinkled face, partially hidden by a mask that covered the mouth and nose, looked into his. The tear-drop shaped mask was made of a flexible, off-white plastic and black nylon straps on either side held the mask in place at the back of the skull. John hadn’t seen one of these in a long time. It reminded him of a jockstrap. Dirty strands of gauze hung loosely at one side of the mouthpiece, and perched on top of the nose ridge was a pair of badly scratched glasses. “Come in.”

John stole a quick glance at the clipboard as he came through the door into the single room. The subject was an older female named Irma. Most of the time it was hard to tell what sex they were but in John’s experience women survived the atmosphere much better than men did. He could tell right away that Irma was like most of his other cases: old, alone, eking out a pathetic living by stealing food to supplement the meager government handouts. The door shut behind him.

“Happy Birthday!” he yelled, turning about and trying to smile with his eyes.

“Oh thank you!” Irma gushed, a pinkish blush creeping up her sagging grey cheeks.

“Now...let me guess how old you are...” John kept his tone jovial, as though he were talking to a small child. She was only forty-one but looked as ancient and broken down as the trees outside.

“I’d say, oh, twenty-three?”

“Oh stop! You know I’m thirty-nine today.” She gestured at his clipboard. He didn’t bother to correct her. Let her keep some semblance of youth, no matter how tenuous. Maybe it was vanity, or insanity, that kept her alive.

“Well. Shall we get started?”

Irma dragged two wooden crates over and they sat down. John laid the clipboard on the floor and drew the metal case up into his lap. As he bent his head over the open case and fiddled with the vials and jars inside he surreptitiously surveyed the room.

In one corner was her bed, a ripped open wooden crate stuffed with plastic bags, newspapers, and bits of cloth. A thick book, faded and dusty, lay beside it but from his position John couldn’t make out the title. A yellowed photograph of a man in uniform hung on the wall above her bed, and further along the same wall was a pile of dirty melamine dishes and a small cooking stove. In the furthest corner was an old plastic pail covered with a weather-blackened wooden plank. The toilet.

He withdrew a small plastic vial, already labeled with Irma’s case number, and offered it to her. Irma knew the procedure and took it from him, wrapping her claw-like hands about it. She took one raspy breath, lifted the mouth covering of her mask and spat a gob of brownish phlegm into the vial. Dropping the mask back over her mouth she handed it back to John. He capped the vial and stored it back in the case while Irma sat quietly on the crate and waited for the next step.

John took out two sets of tweezers, one of which was already fitted with a round white filter pad, and leaned in close to Irma. “Okay deep breath,” he instructed. Irma screwed up her face and sucked in air.

With the first set of tweezers he pulled the old filter from the mouthpiece, quickly grabbed the second pair and slid the new filter pad into place.

“Breathe now,” he said, but Irma was already breathing in noisily.

“Nothing like a new filter, eh?” he said. Irma smiled and nodded. Her eyebrows relaxed.

He put the used filter into a plastic baggie, labeled with the case number, and stored it in one of the pockets of the metal case.

The next step he always dreaded, as did every other Health Department worker he had ever known. When he removed a large jar and a pair of steel tongs from the case, Irma stood and led him to the pail in the corner. She removed the plank and John was thankful that his mask filtered out most of the stench. Inside the pail a gross collection of human excrement floated in a sea of pale urine.

A few dozen cockroaches, subjected to the sudden light and movement, rushed upward and over the sides of the pail, scurrying into corners and beneath dishes. John’s stomach lurched upward but he mentally pushed it back down. A couple of roaches had crawled right across Irma’s bare feet but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

It amazed him that, without a mask, any other living creature would be dead within a week, but these hideous bugs had found a way to thrive on the pollution. John knew that in earlier, cleaner days cockroaches hadn’t fed on shit but, he supposed, they’d evolved. The strongest and most fit to survive. No wonder all the research money went to the study of these little buggers. Years ago it had been the tsetse fly; now it was roaches.

John reached into the pail and snagged the firmest of the feces with the tongs and dropped it into the jar where it made a thick plopping noise as it hit the bottom. He capped the jar, also labeled, bagged the tongs, and stowed them away in the metal case. He picked up the clipboard from the floor, flicked off a stray roach, and made his notations. He handed the board to Irma and she pressed her thumb on the line he indicated.

“Are there any openings?” she asked, her eyebrows once again knotted.

It was the standard question, asked by every subject. Fictional hospitals had been built to keep her hopes alive but John knew you couldn’t live on hope. He felt a stab of guilt and pressed a few entries on the board, stalling for time.

“You’ve moved up the list a bit,” he said, giving her the standard answer but not meeting her eyes. “We’ll be sure to let you know.” He returned the clipboard to the case pocket and walked to the front door.

“Oh can’t you stay just a little longer? I don’t get company very often.” Irma was anxiously banging her hands against her sides and her eyebrows were so tensed they appeared almost joined over her glasses.

“I’m sorry,” John said, honestly feeling it. “I have to go back and fill out my reports. Don’t you have any family? Neighbours?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t go out very often. Sometimes, at night I do...” she trailed off.

John apologized again, feeling like a shithead for wanting to get out of this dingy rat hole. He closed the door quietly behind him and walked back to the clinic. After he dropped the case in the front office, unloading the vials and jars and tucking them into the slots provided, he returned to his room in the military-style barracks where all the Health Department workers lived.

At the door to his quarters he pressed his hand against the side plate and the outer door slid open then closed smoothly behind him. John stood in the anteroom and waited for the beep to signal that the air filter system had detoxified his garments. He pressed his hand to the second side plate and the next door slid open.

He flopped onto the bed and crossed his arms behind his head. Even with all the air filter systems he still had to keep his mask on, in case of emergency. Lying there, he wondered for the billionth time it seemed what the hell the point was? All the Health Department tests were a crock, a public relations ploy to convince people that the government cared about them or, maybe worse, that they could actually do something about the situation.

John sighed and rose from his bed to check his mail. There was a short note from an acquaintance of his at Health Department No. 19, another ad for porn, and a memo from R. Waters, the Health Department’s chief officer.

“Due to government spending cuts, the Health Department is forced to lay off twenty-five employees. Please finish your weekly assignments. Effective April 22, you will be escorted from the premises and assigned new living quarters. Your compensation will be credited to your account.”

John stared at the screen for a moment, stunned. He knew exactly what “new living quarters” meant. He thought of Irma living in a dilapidated shack with the red number twenty-three dripped on it. Irma, or someone like her, was going to be his new neighbour. He closed his eyes and hugged his arms tight around his body, trying to squeeze down the panic that suddenly rose in his gut.

Four months ago, when the last round of layoffs had come, armed security officers had arrived early in the morning and dragged the workers from their quarters. All John could think of was their open-mouthed screams that he hadn’t been able to hear through the soundproof windows.

“No!” he yelled into the stillness of his room. He wouldn’t be forced. He wouldn’t be dragged. And he couldn’t win.

He turned off his terminal and stood up from his desk. After opening the inner and outer doors John stepped out into the early evening. The sun was sinking, the sky a burnt orange colour with steel grey clouds scudding low on the horizon. He took off his mask and dropped it on the ground. He started to walk. To number twenty-three.

Pick up your poo

When Auntie Loo went out for walks

She would return and loudly squawk,

“I simply don’t know what to do!

The park is turning into goo!

And all because of doggy do!

Oh why can’t people pick up their poo?”

When gardening she would beseech

Every dog owner within ear’s reach

“I simply don’t know what to do!

My zinnias are turning blue!

And all because of doggy do!

Oh why can’t people pick up their poo?”

(Beneath her breath Auntie Loo would mutter,

“You bloody swine, you rotting nutters!

Were you born in a barn house loo?

Did no one with a brain raise you?”

But still the shit just grew and grew

And ruined all her overshoes.)

This went on till my Uncle Ted

Decided it was time to act instead

“I love you dearly my darling Loo

But I simply cannot handle you

And all your talk of canine poo

The amount of which you cannot eschew.”

For weeks he staked out every owner

Photographed turds of all dog donors.

“I have the evidence,” Uncle Ted did coo,

“It was so easy to accrue!

And I know now just what to do!

It’s time to start returning poo!”

Under cover of night my Uncle stooped,

On lawns and sidewalks up he scooped.

And into bags of baby blue

Went stools of Dobermans and Shih tsus.

The bags filled up, the numbers grew,

And still my Uncle collected poo.

There was no moon the night my uncle crept

And flung the bags onto porches and decks.

“When they wake up, they will find this stew

And they will probably all say ‘Eww!’

Or maybe even, ‘Huh? What? Or Who?’

I will pray that they step in the doggy do!”

He hurried home and told Loo all

They laughed they drank they had a ball.

And when the sun arose my Auntie Loo

Said, “Ted, you’re too good to be true!”

And Uncle Ted said, “Right back at you.”

And they breakfasted on cheese fondue.

They napped for several hours, then

The doorbell rang, then rang again.

“My name’s Molly Ringworm! Yoohoo!

I’m a reporter with WXT2!

I cover the dog beat in Waterloo

And I have questions about all this poo.”

Auntie Loo peered from the window

Did a double take. Had to breathe slow.

 “Ted,” she said. “Let’s review.

You said that you used bags of blue?

They’re on our lawn! On our barbecue!

And it looks like some have been Superglued!”

Auntie Loo hummed and Auntie Loo hawed

“Perhaps your footprints in the sod.

Is what gave away your derring-do

And even though it was after two

Perhaps somebody spotted you

And thought your methods were undue.”

All that cheese had made Ted feel sickly,

And so he caved in rather quickly.

“I’ll fess up to Molly, I’ll tell her who

Is responsible for the hullabaloo.

It’s a crime I can’t undo,

Or rationalize, or misconstrue.”

But Auntie Loo’s thoughts had wandered

To a scheme that she now pondered.

“There’s a better way to return the poo

To all of those dog owners who

Cannot seem to remember to

Pick up their smelly, shitty spew.”

In their garage, sat a large catapult

A leftover weapon from a former eco-cult.

(That’s a whole other story, a different milieu,

And Auntie Loo would not want me telling you.)

The cameras were rolling at WXT2

When Ted began loading blue baggies of poo.

And on Auntie Loo’s signal, I watched Uncle Ted

Release the crap catapult over Molly’s air head.

Molly’s mouth opened widely and into it flew

A house fly named Frank with nothing better to do

(Molly swallowed but that seems a little bit blue

For a story about dogs and of all of their poo.)

The poo bags landed wetly in several backyards

Onto dogs and their owners and atop several cars.

And from some of the bags, foul leavings flew

The digested meals from doggy wazoos.

Auntie Loo smiled and wished she’d shampooed

But she’d no longer lament all of her ruined shoes

Messed up by dogs and their residues.

She marched to the camera and looked at the screen

She straightened her shirt, she tried to look keen.

“At first I didn’t know what to do,

But NOW if you don’t remember to

Pick up after Fido and Montegue

This catapult’s aim has proven true.

So I think you know what you have to do.

People, pick up your FUCKING poo.”

The February Thaw

It’s only February

It’s the annual February thaw

It’s only February

It’s the annual February thaw

It’s the mantra I mutter these days.

The sun is rising earlier and setting later and, once more, I can noticeably feel the sun on my face and soaking through my dark clothes, without that same lovely heat being ripped away from me by bitter winds. I like the cold but even I must admit that there is a time and place for it.

The annual Ottawa thaw—those few days or week when Mother Nature goes away on vacation, leaving one of her children in charge—usually happens in February. Maybe there are better travel deals in February. When she comes back, as she always does, we’ll be walloped with snow, or an ice storm, or some new hell she picked up in the Caribbean. Like the Sword of Damocles, you fear that when this warm spot of weather suddenly, inevitably ends, it will come crashing down and split you in two.

But the annual thaw is also a time for hope and planning. It’s the time I start looking through my last two years’ of gardening and foraging data, such as it is. Considering how well organized I am in other areas, I still keep this information the old fashioned way, handwritten, and mostly messily at that, in a notebook. A reproduction of a Picasso line drawing is on the cover.

SIDE BAR: There are two things that come to mind when I think of Picasso.

The first is the time my friend Barb and I went to Montreal to see an exhibit of what we delighted in calling “smutty Picasso.” It was a collection of his more sexually explicit pieces, explicit enough for an R-rating so kids weren’t allowed in. A pity, ‘cause Barb and I giggled through much of it—many of the drawings and paintings were hysterically funny. Say what you want about old Pablo, he had a good sense of humour—and we could have hidden our laughter amidst a loud gaggle of small children who hadn’t yet been fitted with their social filters and would undoubtedly be pointing at various body bits and saying things like: “That doesn’t look like mine!”

The second thing I think of when I think of Picasso is the song Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole by The Modern Lovers. The song is very catchy and I highly recommend you go seek it out. It’s on the soundtrack for Repo Man, the movie that gave us such quotable gems as “The more you drive the stupider you are,” and “Look at those assholes, ordinary fucking people. I hate ‘em.”

SIDE BAR TO THE SIDEBAR: I’ve decided not to link to anything in this article. If you’re interested enough in something I mention, like a song or movie title or a quote or a plant, you’ll go find out all about it yourself. Why should I give you free research? Use that delightful coconut of yours.

SIDE BAR TO THE SIDEBAR TO THE SIDEBAR: I’m quite sure there is at least one city in the world, a city with a lot of lawyers in it, that has a bar called The Side Bar. It’d only make sense.

So anyway...

As I said, it’s that time of year that I become consumed with plant thoughts. Will the fiddleheads and knotweed come up early like they did last year? Who knows? It’s fun

Fiddleheads remind me
of the novel
The Day of the Triffids
by John Wyndham

to look out my back porch and dream of the day when the first tight spirals poke out of the mulch in the strip of shaded soil along the back fence.

(Today, to satisfy my urge to dig in the dirt, I cleaned up a few houseplants, mulched, watered, and generally made them more comfortable.)

I reviewed my notebook to see which plants came up when in 2017 and in 2016. I noted all these plants on a new page, and gave rough estimates on when certain plants would first appear. I looked for any weather records. Usually, these records are kept in other notebooks, but sometimes I jot down observations.

It never ceases to amaze me how one good rainstorm and a day of high temperatures can send plants into an embarrassing orgy of growth.

It never ceases to amaze me that I can harvest so much free food so much closer to my kitchen than any grocery store.

Perhaps I’m easily amazed. I’m happy to be so with things as simple and complicated as new life, food, and the ever-changing weather.

None of this makes any difference to the February thaw. Ma Nature will be back soon enough and show her wayward child what winter’s all about. She’ll probably give the March lion less meat, just to make him mean.

The February thaw makes me itchy with anticipation. Itchy like a dog until it can roll, blissfully, in sweet, fresh grass. I want to feel the sun more, smell the ground thaw, and see the plants return. I salivate over thoughts of spring greens, fried up with butter and garlic, or whizzed into pesto.

I can think of worse things to be obsessed with. Still, it won’t hurt to maintain my mantra muttering for a while longer. For my own sanity. Happy February thaw everyone.

February 17, 2018

Ottawa, Ontario

4:45 pm, -1° C

I like weather

The first instalment of the much anticipated new series of weather-related fact sheets, and which will undoubtedly include many other interesting facts about how to humour uncles, squirrel soufflé recipes, and the best time of day to shine one's shoes, by Gail F. Wyndes

Instalment #2016-1Ai: North and South

I like weather. I like reading about weather and watching weather related news. I like talking about the weather with people on the bus or at bus stops, the blood donor bus, and many other bus-related places. School buses are good if you can get on them. Don’t forget about busing tables in restaurants; that not only affords you the chance to chat all things weather with a wide range of people, you also get paid to do it! Unless you are the bus boy in a biker bar, in which case, best to keep your trap shut, your eyes open, and your sneakers laced and ready to run. Or so my Uncle Hemlock used to tell me all the time whilst taking a shit with the door open in our family’s cottage outhouse.

I like experiencing certain types of weather and most definitely I like experiencing certain types of weather much more than others.

The one that really pickles my walnuts is the classic north-south match up.

Have you ever had the pleasure of standing on my porch of a late September evening when a warm southern front meets up with its cooler cousin from the north? Of course you haven’t. We don’t know each other. If you were on my porch and I saw you there, I would ask what you wanted, or not, depending on whether you were a) holding a gun b) holding a puppy c) holding a gun to a puppy’s head. But back to the weather.

As a Canadian, and therefore a weather expert, I wouldn’t lie to you. I might ramble on incoherently, apropos of nothing, non sequiturially, thesaurus in hand, or rather, in what was once a rather chic black leather knapsack, perhaps four hundred years ago, but which has now been so abused that it’s a wonder it stays together at all. I suppose it’s because of the children. But I would never lie.

I shall now relate how I first came to admire, then love this exquisite yet maddeningly too infrequent event.

So. I was standing on my porch of a late September evening. The thermometer read 14 Celsius, which I knew to be our country's secret code for 57 Fahrenheit, but it felt a bit clammy so I wore my heavy fleece jacket. Humidity rising could only mean one thing, I thought: Moisture from the south. As though to reward me for my conclusion (and for being able to even think the word “moisture” without gagging), a warm and flirty wind lovingly caressed my armpit. But the moment the thought was thunk, and the caressed carunked, a shiver ran down my left arm as a north wind suddenly socked me in the bicep, the kind you get from a long lost buddy to whom you still owe $500. Friendly, but with a hint of barely controlled hatred.

After some embarrassing trials and errors, which included many secret, semi-naked meteorological rituals, and which, thankfully, the neighbours didn’t see, I discovered that, by keeping my left arm inside the jacket and my right arm out of it, and tucking the right sleeve, which would otherwise be dangling dangerously by my side, ever threatening to expose my vulnerable left side to the increasingly crotchety north wind, into the waistband of my jeans, I could keep myself at a perfectly even temperature. Slightly warm on one side. Slightly cool on the other. This is a most delicious feeling. I recommend it highly. It may take years before you experience it, so be patient. It is well worth the wait. Like a good soufflé at a fancy restaurant.

Although... I suppose one could create a facsimilous experience if one employed a hot water bottle filled with warm Earl Grey tea on one side of one’s body and a bag of spring time fresh frozen peas that has been allowed to thaw in the reference section of your nearest library for exactly 37 minutes on the other. All I ask it that you don’t do it on my porch.

That’s all for this instalment of I like weather.

Knock knock!

Written for the June 17, 2016 Flash Fiction Challenge: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2016/06/10/flash-fiction-challenge-knock-knock-whos-there/.


Knock knock!

I hear the sound of someone rapping at my door. But not. There is no vibration of knuckles on wood. Only the sound, a recorded voice, saying the words.

Knock knock!

I peer out the small frosted window but can't make anything out in the driving snow. It doesn't matter. I know what's behind the door. I pick up the baseball bat with my right hand and unlock then open the door with my left.

Knock knock!

This one hovers, like a hummingbird, in the cold air and snow. When I open the door wide, it corrects itself, backs up and lowers itself to my eyeline. This is a dumb thing to do. I hear the micro-pause just before the phone connects to the voice behind the drone, take a step onto the front porch and swing the bat downwards. I immediately change my stance as the drone loses altitude and almost hits the snow covered deck, but like a fly swatted not hard enough it recovers in time and is on its way back up when I swing again and send it flying into the trunk of a red maple. It smashes to pieces and hits the ground; in less than a minute the detritus is covered over with a fine layer of snow as the lights from within its mangled contents continue to flash.

I retreat inside, lock the door and knock the snow off my slippers. I change into boots and put on my winter coat. I set the kettle to boil, then go to the basement for the bleach. I mix bleach and hot water in a heavy duty plastic spray bottle and go back outside.

A half centimetre of snow now covers the drone and the lights flicker infrequent and choppy. If I didn't know better, I'd feel bad for it. Like maiming an animal and allowing it to suffer a long and painful death. But it's not an animal. It's a drone, sent to hound me, shriek at me, make me break down.

I spray the carcass. It sparks a few times then goes dark. I twist open the spray bottle top and dump the contents onto the remaining pieces. The snow immediately begins covering them up again.

The first two drones they sent I blasted with a shotgun. After the first one, I got a nasty call telling me that the destruction of their property, i.e., the drone, would be added to my bill. After I shot the second drone into a thousand pieces over the yard I was robbed. The garage lock was jimmied and all of my weapons, which had been neatly stored in foam forms in a metal locker, were taken.

After the robbery, I amassed other, less conventional weapons. The baseball bat was an obvious choice but I also placed gardening tools and large kitchen knives throughout rooms in the house along with dozens of undone wire hangers that could be used as whips. The rag mop I left in the kitchen; it was still a useful cleaning tool but I could also see how its dreadlocks could be used to lasso a drone and bring it down like an errant calf.

Sometimes I stop and admire the absurdity that all this is happening because I can't pay a lousy hospital bill. Ten grand it cost when my appendix burst. I was only supposed to be here for a year, and four months in, bam! This happens. The excruciating pain prevented me from asking the ambulance driver to take me to another hospital, anywhere but Amazon General. I'd read the news stories. But that was the closest one. Or the driver was on the Amazon payroll. That wouldn't surprise me.

I am thankful that the doctors at AmGen knew what they were doing and I had no post-operative complications and went home the day after the surgery with a list of do's and don'ts, a prescription for a mild painkiller and one for antibiotics, and an admonishment to take it easy. I followed their diet and took the meds but taking it easy was going to be impossible if I had to fight collection drones every day.

I go back inside. Before I even get my boots off, I've made up my mind. This third drone is the charm that convinces me. They won't stop coming and they could get worse. Much worse. I'd read the news stories.

There is only one sensible thing to do.

It takes three days—three days of fending off multiple drones with the bat, wire whips and a garden spade—but the transport has finally arrived. I'm going home.

After the initial take off and the always jarring leap into hyperspace, I get up from my seat and go to one of the bed cabins. All I want is to sleep but my body is too keyed up and instead I stare out the porthole at the dark space and the stars for what seems forever. Eventually, my muscles relax and my eyelids start to droop.

They shoot open at the sound.

Knock knock!

Make them cry

It was the second last day of Carla's visit with her sister Angela, Angela's husband George and their two children, three-year old Marie and ten-year old George Junior.

Junior, as his family called him, was a smart-mouthed, malicious little monster. The kind of kid who thought nothing of ripping the legs off spiders or the wings off butterflies. The kind of kid who, if he hadn't already, would someday take a shovel and smack a live frog like it was a baseball.

Carla was the only one who called him Georgie. Georgie Porgie. Georgie Porgie, puddin' 'n pie, kissed the girls and made them cry / When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away!

Carla knew it wasn't right to taunt a child, let alone hate one. Nevertheless, she despised her nephew intensely.

After a shopping trip with Angela—during which it was left to Carla to amuse an unamuseable Marie while her sister tried on outfit after outfit in store after store asking each time whether this or that made her look fat—Carla grabbed a beer from the fridge and retreated to the guest room.

Carla kicked off her shoes, twisted off the beer cap and took a swig. She toed the door shut. She opened the balcony doors and took a seat on one of the wicker chairs outside. She looked out at the ravine for a minute then reached beneath the chair and retrieved an empty beer bottle, her ashtray. She smoked a cigarette and popped the butt into the empty bottle, then took a pack of chips from her purse, opened them and wolfed them down. She gargled with beer to dislodge the potato mush that stuck to her teeth.

The sun was setting and the afternoon had grown cooler and windier. A sudden gust blew the balcony doors inward and Carla started at the sound of a door slamming. She turned and started again. Sitting in the middle of the duvet, picking his filthy fingernails, was George Junior.

"Christ! You scared the shit outta me!" Carla grabbed her cigarettes and lit one.

"You said shit! You said shit!"

"Make yourself useful," Carla said. "Go get me another beer."

"Get it yourself. 'Sides, Dad says you drink too much of his beer."

She knew it was wrong to want to scare the bejesus out Georgie Porgie but she did. Oh God, how she did! Short of backhanding him with all of her rings on, she thought, frightening him half to death would be the next best thing, maybe even better. It might do a little long-term damage. But how?

And she knew that that was even more wrong. A smack is a smack. Most kids get over those. Scarring a psyche was just plain mean.

Once George Junior realized that his aunt wasn't going to say anything about him saying shit, twice, he said, "You're not allowed to smoke in the house."

"I'm not in the house, am I?" Carla said, a little nastily. She blew smoke in his direction but the wind shifted and the smoke drifted to the other side of the room. She adjusted her chair. She watched her nephew pick at his fingernails a while longer, using the time to entertain a few pleasant scenarios, well, pleasant for her, when he said something that gave her a delicious idea.

"My mom's got enormous knockers. What happened to yours?"

Carla savoured the moment. The anticipation of his terrified white face. He might even cry! Or wet himself. She dropped the cigarette in the beer bottle and heard the heater sizzle as it hit the bottom. She stood up and faced her nephew.

"You really want to know?" she asked. She stood framed in the doorway, the wind ruffling her dark curly brown hair. She glanced over her shoulder. Thunderclouds were piling into one another and she could smell rain in the air. Far off she heard a low rumble.

At the thunder George Junior looked up from his fingernails and past his aunt to the slate grey sky. An ever-so-slight look of panic crossed his face but he recovered and shrugged. "Sure."

"It was about ten years ago," Carla began, lighting another cigarette. "The year you were born, in fact."

George Junior didn't especially like his Aunt Carla. She called him Georgie Porgie and although she had never said it, he knew that she hated him because he was fat. This was, in fact, not true at all. Carla despised him not his weight. She was, however, the most interesting relative he had. She smoked and drank and wore "outrageous outfits," according to his mother.

"Do you know what a mammogram is?" Carla asked.

"Yeah," he said. He didn't. This wasn't turning out as interesting as he'd hoped. When she hadn't freaked over him saying shit, he had upped the ante with knockers, but she still hadn't taken the bait.

"Oh I don't think you do," she said. She smoked her cigarette, biding her time. "A mammogram," she finally continued, "is a medical procedure. Women have it done to see if their br—knockers are healthy."

George Junior's eyebrows twitched in puzzlement but he kept his questions to himself. Sheet lightning lit up the sky and aunt and nephew silently, and unknown to the other, counted the seconds.

One, two, three, four, five. Thunder.

"Turns out, mine weren't. Healthy that is."

"Why?"

Lightning.

One, two, three, four. Thunder. A little louder this time.  A little closer.

"That's hard to explain but I knew for sure when I had that mammogram." She paused and her nephew didn't disappoint. Children could be so easily led.

"Why? What happened?" George Junior sat up on his knees. He leaned forward, his fingernails forgotten.

"I had to go to the hospital and have them checked by a machine."

Carla stepped into the room and moved toward the bed.

"A machine?" George Junior tried to imagine what a machine that checked knockers would look like.

"Hmm hmm. A machine."

Lightning.

One, two, three. Very loud. Tree branches thrashed dangerously in the wind and Carla could hear her sister's wind chimes jingling frantically on the porch below.

"They put my knockers in the machine. It was like a vice," Carla said, coming up to the edge of the bed. She bent over her nephew, grabbed her small breasts in her hands and squeezed them together.

Lightning.

She stood up.

One.

"Flattened 'em!"

Two.

"Blew 'em out like a tire!"

CRACK!

Carla clapped her hands together in front of her nephew's face as the thunder boomed. George Junior screeched and fell backwards off the bed.

Carla crawled slowly onto the mattress and looked over the side. Her nephew was sprawled on the floor, his shirt untucked. He was panting. She leaned over and pointed a finger close to his crotch.

"Imagine having your balls squished. In a vice."

As Carla smacked her hands together again the sharp crack of thunder was a rifle shot out of nowhere. No lightning had foretold its arrival.

George Junior bolted for the door, flailing at the doorknob, and screaming for his mother.

"Oh Georgie Porgie," Carla called after him. "Grab me another beer, won't you?"