The Drop

The man stood waiting with his back to the desk.
It was dim in the room. Pale light struggling through the small barred window fell onto the tiled walls and floor. The shelf opposite the desk was stacked with dressings, rolled bandages and a large, rust-coloured bottle of iodine, to disinfect caning wounds.
I tried to swallow. Bile pooled at the back of my tongue but my throat was too dry to get rid of it.

Address to the Greenville Senior Women’s Club 35th Annual Pedigreed Dog Show by the mystery writer H.L. Lemontre

It’s quite an honor to be speaking today as both a guest and a participant. I am asked to speak at a lot of dog shows by fans of my mystery series, but rarely do I get the chance to speak in my own hometown, and even more rarely do I get to speak at a show where my own dog is also a contender. Perhaps you’ll indulge an old woman if I tell you a bit about how I came to write the Fluffems series.

10,...9,...wait.
...a designated paranormal landing.

sulking to a greater distant hips up to her chin she's in she's not the same she's not in the same person lost all perspective simmering over an unfoiling iodine draining coffin.

soldiers out back in sheep's clothing asking for a second politely ignorant attaching.

I just plain paper thin slow down word.

first which does it really matter not one more minute scatters an obvious I'll skip, the aching for your mother read well.

where was I was dreaming cloaked tenuous hovering wait I'm getting something in there it is again no not yet there it's coming in oh it has unsoundless mind awake now or think.

Everybody called her Grandma Scott, but Eliza Scott (nee Lingstad) was nobody's grandmother. The Scotts didn't have children. Eliza was the eldest of three sisters, and she treated her younger siblings' offspring with grandmotherly affection. My mother fondly recalled spending several weeks each year at the Scott farm helping to tend and feed the animals and taking baskets of food and water to the fields for the threshing crews at harvest time. She and her older sister Nora helped Grandma Scott make the sandwiches for the noon meal for the workers. And every morning she and Nora were dispatched to the barn to search for eggs deposited in secret places by the Scott's brood of laying hens. My mother said there was nothing like having fresh eggs for breakfast. Eliza's sugar cookies, as big as dinner plates, were a special treat as well.

When the weather was nice, sometimes the boys in the art department would eat their lunches on the roof of the building. It was pleasant to be outside in the fresh air and sunshine after being cooped up in the cubicles all morning. For a time, the roof was the place to be from twelve o'clock until one, especially after Shuffle discovered the hole in the skylight over the fourth-floor women's powder room. Shuffle was a big, happy-go-lucky Jewish kid from New York. He never ran when he could walk and seldom walked when he could sit still. When he did move, it was very slowly.

My barber, Frank, is the world's most talkative human being. He is a tall, skinny man with straight blonde hair, big ears, almost no chin, and the bluest eyes you'll ever see.

Frank is smart, forthright with opinions on an endless variety of subjects, and unburdened by the handicap of a formal education. When you sit down in a chair in his shop, you never know what else you are going to get in addition to a haircut. Last week it was a lecture on Intelligent Design.

"I get a kick out of these religious folks," Frank offered after he had draped me with an apron and wet and combed my hair. "Trying to sneak God into the schools by the back door."

The yellow arrows on the pavement split to left and right, defining the acceptable movements of vehicles. And for a while, I'm immobilized, thinking of a butterfly flapping its wings. A typhoon I don't want to create, so I sit in my car, studying the arrows. And I think then of my exhaust and of the Greenhouse Effect (especially because my particular automobile mocks emissions tests), and realize that not moving is a butterfly flapping its wings just as surely as turning is. And I'm jolted into action, but still haven't made a choice. I shift my foot from the brake to the gas and the car leaps forward, splitting the arrows.