(It came to my attention that I should add an explanation, so here it is: um, I was bored. It’s a short piece of crap. Copyright Claudia Mahler, 2007)

On Sunday, Andy was going to be hanged. As soon as I learned of this I felt obligated to go visit him, so after work on Friday I went to the city jail where they were holding him. It was the first time I’d ever been in the city jail. There were not many windows, but there were just enough so that the light from the summer sun blazed through and made hot rectangles of light every few feet on the hallway floor. There were only five cells and the warden’s office, and when I entered the first thing I saw was Andy. He was sitting alone in the cell facing me. His eyes brightened when he saw me and he stood.

“Hey Davey,” he said to me. He was smiling and his bright white teeth shone in a patch of light blaring through the warden’s office window.

“Hey, man,” I said. “What’d you do?”

“Ah, it was nothing.” He pointed past my right shoulder. “Gotta go see him before you visit me.” I followed the direction of his finger to the warden’s office, where I was met by a stern looking midget of a man, who proceeded to ask for my identification and my relation to Andy.

“I’m just a friend,” I said. I watched him grab his ring of keys from his desk. “What’d he do?”

The warden stopped searching for the key and looked at me for a second. “Didn’t you hear?” he said. I shook my head. “They caught him reading.” He found the key, stood, and guided me to Andy’s cell. Andy smiled again and moved over on the bench he was sitting on. I sat beside him as the warden closed the cell door and returned to his work. We sat there, looking at each other.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” He looked the same as he’d had a few months ago when I’d last seen him.

“Would you like a cigarette?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“No smoking in here,” the warden said, looking up and seeing me handing a cigarette to Andy.

“Come on, man,” Andy said, flashing his white teeth at the warden. “I’m gonna be dead in two days.”

The warden glanced at him and then at me. “Alright. Just one,” he said, returning to his work. Andy took the cigarette and I lit it for him. He took a long drag, then leaned back against the concrete wall. We stayed silent for a minute.

“You…you were reading?” I asked at last.

“Oh, man…” he smiled, shaking his head. “They finally caught me.”

“At home?”

“Naw,” he said. He took another drag. “To a bunch of kids.”

“What the hell?” I stared at him.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“You know that’s illegal, Andy—”

“Ah, it’s that stupid ban they got in place. It’s been around way too long.”

“You should have known—”

“Hey, I knew. Why shouldn’t kids get to read? I got to read, you got to read, nothing’s wrong with us.” I remained staring at him, and he proceeded to tell me what had happened. He had been out on Wednesday alone by the river with a book. Some kids had come along from the local high school and noticed him. Not knowing what the book was they had asked him about it, and Andy, being Andy, told them nothing but instead began to read to them.

“Why didn’t you just put it away?” I asked him.

“They’d already seen it,” he replied. “So I figured, why not, and flipped back to the beginning and read them the first page.” He laughed, his teeth showing. “We were to page fifty before those cops caught us.” Two men doing their daily rounds had come across Andy and his little reading group. Immediately they snatched the book from his hands and took him into custody.

“The kids went to therapy,” he said. “Can you believe that? For a damn book. And I went here. They asked me where I’d gotten the book, and I told them I owned it. You should have seen the looks on their faces when I told them that this wasn’t the only book I had.” He laughed again. “Right there, that was about four violations of the ban.”

Andy was held in custody for the evening, as the mayor was informed of the atrocities that had occurred and that a member of the state had violated the fiction ban. The governor then heard, and then the state Supreme Court, and it was decided that afternoon without a trial what Andy’s fate would be.

“Well, what the hell’d you do it for?” I remained staring at Andy, despite that the whole incident seemed rather typical of him.

“I don’t know.” His cigarette had gone out; he dropped it at his feet. I picked at my fingernails.

“It was in their eyes, man,” he said after a minute. He looked me. “It was like they were hypnotized or something. Every word…it was like they had to keep listening…they had to know what happened next. You know that look?”

“Yeah.”

“Danny had had that look in his eyes when I first read to him. He was a year old.” He laughed. “He didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but he wanted me to keep going anyway.” He paused again. “Those kids had that same look. First time they’d been read to.”

“Jesus.” I leaned my back against the cool concrete wall, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be fifteen and never read to. “What book were you reading to them?”

“The Great Gatsby. Ever read it?”

“Man, years ago. Eighth grade or something.”

“Yeah. Everybody did back then.” He paused. “Danny never got to. The ban hit just as he was going into preschool. All he got to was The Cat in the Hat, and the schools beat that out of his mind so fast that he doesn’t even remember reading it.”

was quiet. I thought of Greg. He had never been read to. “I take it they found the rest of the books.”

“Yeah. Bastards burned them, too. I probably had the last copy of The Great Gatsby in the state.”

“What does Beth think?”

“I don’t think she thinks,” he said. “She’s too mad to think.” I smiled a little. I could imagine Beth at home totally losing it, slamming the phone down and flushing her wedding ring down the toilet.

“She hasn’t talked to me since I called her on Thursday to tell her I was going to be hanged.”

“Danny?”

“Beth won’t let him see me. You’re the only one who’s visited.” He smiled. “I hope I get a bigger turnout on Sunday.”

“Maybe something’ll happen and you’ll get off.”

“Eh, I doubt it.”

“I heard,” I said, “that out east they’re stopping these things.”

Andy snorted. “Just like the east,” he said. “They make these radical new rules then abandon them just when the west gets serious about them.”

“The news said there’ll be a group of protesters from Massachusetts here on Sunday. They heard about you and are coming to do something about it.”

They’d better make some damn compelling arguments,” Andy said, smiling again. “I’ll have the noose around my neck at that point.” I looked at him. He seemed calm about the whole thing, almost tired.

“Are you scared?” I asked him. He shrugged.

“Nah. I’ll get off. If I don’t, well, I died for a noble cause, right?”

I stared at him a moment longer but could see no fear in his face. I glanced at my watch and noticed it was getting late.

“I’ll visit you tomorrow morning, early,” I said, standing up and signaling the warden.

“You’d better,” Andy replied, smiling. “And bring the cigarettes with you.”

“I will.” I smiled back. The warden clanked open the cell door and I went out the way I came in.

“See you tomorrow,” I said, giving him a wave. Andy, with a bright smile, gave me a little salute.

I got home at seven. Annie was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner. Greg was sitting in the highchair at the table.

“Hey Greggy,” I said. I lifted him up and tucked him into my hip as I went to kiss Annie.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked me.

“I went to see Andy,” I said, bouncing Greg up and down.

“What’s he in for?” Annie had heard me talk about it that morning.

“Reading.”

She stopped what she was doing. “Reading?” she asked. “Seriously?”

“They caught him down by the river. He was reading Fitzgerald to a bunch of kids. Doesn’t that sound just like him?” She didn’t say anything. “I’m going to visit him again tomorrow. Beth won’t go and see him.”

“You’re going to see him again?” she asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

She shrugged. “They caught him reading,” she said. “What are they going to do with him?”

“What do you think? They’re going to hang him.”

“When?”

“Sunday.”

She said no more, and for the rest of the night she was rather quiet. This was not unusual, and I thought nothing of it. I went about my usual evening activities, and slid into bed around ten.

The next morning I awoke to find Annie lying next to me, staring up at the ceiling. I moved my hand to touch her hair, but she turned and laid with her back to me. I put my arm around her waist. She took it and flung it off.

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“It could have been you they caught instead of Andy, you know that?” There was a slight quiver in her voice. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. They could have been doing their rounds and come in here and caught you reading Shakespeare on the couch.”

I laughed. “I’m not that stupid, Annie,” I said “And I’m not Andy. I don’t go around reading to kids in broad daylight.”

“I don’t like you going to see him,” she said, still facing away from me. “It makes you look suspicious.”

“Ah, they don’t care.”

“They’ll be checking us out more often. What if they catch you reading to Greg one day? I know you do it.”

“You do it, too.”

“I don’t keep old volumes of poetry in the basement behind the wine. What if they find that one day?”

“They’re not going to look there.”

“I don’t want you to visit Andy,” she said again.

“What he did was right,” I said.

“He broke the law.”

“The law is wrong. And we both break it all the time.”

“I don’t want you to go visit him,” she said again.

“No one else will,” I said, a feeling of annoyance building in my gut. I got out of bed and began searching for clothes. “Beth won’t even talk to him.”

“She’s smart,” Annie said. Her voice got a little louder as she sensed my anger. “She’s keeping away from him. I don’t see why you’re thinking of him and not your own family.”

“Yeah, well I think it’s wrong that they’re not even talking to him over the phone,” I said, bending over and tying my shoelaces. “I’m going to see him,” I stood up and went to leave. “Whether you let me or not.”

“You have a son, Dave,” she shouted as I exited the room. “Think of your son!” I descended the stairs and left through the front door, allowing the screen door to slam on my way out.

I walked briskly down the street. She didn’t know Andy like I did. I had every right to visit him. I stalked down the streets without paying much thought to anything around me until I realized that I was walking down Andy’s street. I turned to look at his house and there was Beth, taking in the laundry from the line that stood in their front yard. I called to her. She shielded her eyes in the bright sunlight, recognized it was me, and waited in the doorway as I climbed the stairs of the front porch.

“Hey Beth,” I said.

Hey Dave.” She smiled slightly. Her eyes looked tired. I could hear Danny playing the piano inside. “Where are you off to?”

“I’m just going to visit Andy,” I said.

The smile disappeared. “Don’t talk to me about him,” she said flatly. She turned to go back into the house.

“Why?” I asked. She didn’t answer. “Beth, he—”

“He’s selfish,” she said, stopping and turning back to me. “That’s what it is. That’s what it’s always been about, not the books. Did he ever stop to think of me during this whole thing? Or Danny?” Her eyes were set on my face, as if I could tell her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He just told me you weren’t talking to him.”

She stared at me for a moment. “Why should we,” she finally said, “get dragged into this? I told him over and over, every time he went out to read by that tree, that someday someone would catch him and then I’d be all alone. And Danny’d be without his father. Do you think he listened?”

Think of your son.” Annie’s words sprung back into my head. I felt sick to my stomach all of a sudden, and leaned against the molding of the door.

Beth continued. “Every day when he went out there I almost expected the call from the police, saying that they’d caught him. Thursday I picked up the phone and what did I hear? ‘Hey babe, I’m in jail. They’re gonna kill me on Sunday.’ Do you think, after that, that I have an obligation to go visit him?”

“No,” I said quietly.

“He expects us to watch the hanging. I told him there’s no way in hell I’m going up there to watch him die, and there’s even less chance of me letting Danny go up there.”  I was quiet.

“Dave,” Beth said. I looked at her. “Why are you going up there?”

I didn’t know. I shrugged my shoulders. Beth smiled slightly again and put her hand on my shoulder.

“Tell him I—” she stopped herself. “Take care,” she said instead, and went inside the house. After a moment, I left the front porch and continued walking.

The closer I got to the jail the worse I felt. The argument I’d had with Annie put me in a sour mood, and the conversation with Beth had made it worse. I didn’t want to go see Andy anymore. I went anyway, though, but with a tickle of anger in my throat that I was unaware of until I saw him. When I entered the jail he was sitting on the bench, his white teeth shining at me through his smiling mouth. He had been expecting me. “Long time no see,” he said. I wanted to slap him. The warden opened the cell and I entered, sitting slightly further away from him on the bench. I avoided looking at him until he scooted closer to me.

“I thought you weren’t gonna show,” he said.

“Well, I’m here now.” I focused my attention on the bars in front of me.

“I was bored. All a guy can do is think in a place like this, and let me tell you—there’s not much to think about.” he paused. I could feel him smiling. “Except dying. Hey, can I have one of your cigs?”

“I forgot them.”

“Then go back and get ’em,” he said, still smiling. “I’ve only got a few more days; I want all the cigarettes I get. I’m on my death bed, here.”

“Look, will you stop joking about it, please?” The words came out louder and angrier than I had thought they would.

The smile on Andy’s face died away. “What’s your problem?”

“You’re gonna die tomorrow, man,” I said. “They’re gonna hang you. Don’t you care?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think I did anything wrong. If they kill me, they kill me.”

“What about the rest of us, then,” I said, my voice growing louder. “How do you think I feel, watching all this happen? I’ve known you since kindergarten, man.”

“I know.”

“How do you think Beth feels?”

“She abandoned me.”

“No, she just can’t come up and see you because if she does, she’s putting Danny at risk. I talked to her today.”

“Why?” He suddenly got defensive.

“I just passed the house, dude, relax. She said that you never thought about her or Danny.” I stopped. He said nothing. “You never thought about me, either.”

“I just did what I thought was right,” Andy said. I couldn’t tell if he was ashamed or angry. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. It’s the bigger idea that I’m worried about, not me. I think that’s what’s more important—”

“Fine,” I said. I was sick of listening to him. I stood up and signaled to the warden to let me out of the cell. “If you don’t give a crap about yourself, then neither do I.” The warden opened the cell door and I pushed past him without a second glance at Andy.

I stayed at home and watched television the rest of the day, trying to keep my mind off of Andy, but every few minutes his bright teeth flashed in my mind and I found myself back at the cell with him. It was guilt.

Finally that night it got to the point where I couldn’t take it any longer. I told Annie I was going to the bar and walked the long way, avoiding Andy’s house, to the city jail.

The jail had an eerie quietness about it—different than when I went to visit Andy during the day. When I entered Andy was sitting facing the corner of the cell. He didn’t hear me enter. The same warden was there; he recognized me and stood to let me in to the cell. The door banged open and Andy was woken from his trance with the wall. He turned and looked at me, saying nothing.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” His eyes followed me as I walked toward the bench and sat next to him. He remained quiet, and so did I. I reached automatically for a pair of cigarettes, but then realized that I’d forgotten to put the pack in my pocket when I had gone home.

“Still no cigarettes?” He asked.

Nope.” He didn’t say anything. “Look,” I said finally, not turning to him but keeping my eyes on the floor. “I’m sorry I got angry with you. It’s just…it was a stupid thing to do, reading to those kids.”

“I did it for a cause—”

“I know, man. I know. But it was stupid.”

“It wasn’t stupid,” he said. “It was…it was against the law, but it was important. I know why people are avoiding me and I don’t blame them.” He looked down at his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “It’d just be nice to have somebody on my side with me at the end, that’s all.”

It grew quiet again. The cells around us were empty and the warden, confident that I had not come to break Andy out, had left us to go work in another room. Andy sat next to me on the bench, resting forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced in front of him. I sat with my arms crossed, unsure of whether or not to speak. If I had remembered the cigarettes it would have been a lot less awkward, but I hadn’t, so we remained where we were, sitting quietly without words.

The pale light of the moon shone through the warden’s office window and fell on us as thick columns, broken up by the bars of the cell. A bar of darkness rose up my left thigh and arm, another bisected my right shoulder. Andy sat near the corner in almost total darkness, the left of his body palely illuminated.

“So are you going tomorrow?” The sound of his voice was out of place and almost surreal.

Why wouldn’t I go?”

“I don’t know. Beth’s not going. Neither are the boys.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Danny has Sunday school. Beth…well, she’s Beth.”

“Sorry, dude.”

He shrugged again and began playing with his fingers. I looked away, feeling like I was making him uncomfortable. A spider crawling across the floor of the jail caught my attention. Out of want of something to alleviate the awkwardness, I focused on it. As I watched its slender legs throwing even slenderer shadows in front of it I allowed my mind to wander. To what, I wasn’t sure, but I was momentarily unaware of Andy sitting next to me.

Vaguely I heard the ringing of the clock in the town square, signifying 11:00. As the eleventh bell rang I became aware of another, softer sound, like the sound of a rabbit breathing. I caught out of the corner of my eye Andy’s head sink down into his hands and it took me a moment to put two and two together and realize that he was crying. I sat there a moment, unsure over what to do. The last time I’d seen him cry was back in fourth grade. Then quietly, gently, I took him, guided him with my hands towards me and rested his head on my shoulder. I wrapped my arms around him the way I would my son.

There we sat, with the light from the window growing ever softer, for hours, as Andy cried. Into the night I held him, feeling his shoulders shake and his hot breath on my back, until finally the soft sobbing diminished into rhythmic breathing and his head grew heavy on my shoulder. I held him for a moment longer, then with my hands supporting him lifted him from my shoulder and lowered him to a supine position on the bench where we sat.

I signaled to the warden, who had returned to his office sometime during the night, and he stood and walked over to the cell. Noiselessly he opened the cell door, and I exited swiftly without a word. Numbly, in silence, I walked down the hallway and out into the dark street.

The clock on the microwave read 3:53 when I got home. Quietly in the stale darkness I ascended the stairs, passed Greg’s room, from which the sounds of his gentle breathing was heard, and pushed open the bedroom door. Annie was asleep. Without a sound I removed my shoes and slipped into bed, clothes and all. I thought of Andy, briefly, with his white teeth showing, and then fell into a restful and uneventful sleep.

The next morning I awoke at seven. The incident last night had not left me, but it was pushed back into my mind from the haze of sleep. I rolled out of bed slowly, trying not to wake Annie, feeling hot already. The clothes from yesterday would suffice for today as well, so I put on a pair of sandals and left the house to go to the town square. I could feel the heat of the day already beginning to build.

Nobody was awake yet. It was a Sunday. The only sound came from my sandaled feet crunching over the rocks on the sidewalk. Our house was a few blocks from the city square; I tried taking my time getting there, but for some reason or another my feet wouldn’t slow and I reached the square faster than I had planned. I was aware of a tickling of nervousness in my gut that brought me back to the test-taking days of school.

No one was in the square; the only thing in sight was the raised platform and for a second I thought of tearing the whole apparatus down so that the procedure would have to be delayed, but at that moment a man wearing black walked out from behind the platform and I abandoned the idea.

“Came to watch the hangin’?” he asked, a broom in his hand.

“Yeah.” The man proceeded to sweep the stairs to the platform. He was not local; no one in our town knew how to go about hanging people. A violation of the fiction ban was the only case in which hanging was used, and the last time a violation had occurred was three years ago when a traveling salesman bearing self-help books had wandered into town.

“You’re here awful early,” he remarked, pausing to look at me.

“The guy was—is—a friend of mine.” Immediately he lowered his head and resumed sweeping, perhaps out of sympathy but more likely out of fear that he would be recognized conversing with the friend of a reader.

He was right, though, I had gotten here early. My eagerness was not justifiable—Andy was not here and would not be here for hours, and there certainly wasn’t anything I could do to save him at this point. Realizing this, but realizing also that I could not just go back home and return several hours later, I asked the man if there was any place to sit. He produced a foldout chair for me, and on it I sat to wait it out.

Before the first of the spectators arrived, the man in black had swept the platform clean and had, together with a policeman, test-run the procedure with a sandbag equal to Andy’s weight twice and had deemed the rope worthy. They had also discussed how they should angle the platform so that the spectators would not have the sun in their eyes and had adjusted it accordingly.

The first family arrived at ten. They lived next to Andy and their son was with them, hanging on his mother’s skirt and asking if this would take long. They looked at me and me at them, but upon seeing me looking back they immediately averted their eyes and guided their son to the opposite side of the platform. Soon people were coming in groups. For as hot as it was, the square was filling up rapidly with people coming out of their homes to witness the first hanging in three years.

The man in black came up to me and requested the chair back; the mayor had arrived and he was looking for a place to sit. I gave up the chair and stood with the rest of the crowd. By ten thirty, the square was filled.

The pressure of the late morning heat was pushing on us from all directions. The crowd, glistening under the sun, remained sluggish despite the spectacle they were about to witness. Occasionally people swayed towards each other to talk or staggered apathetically from one side of the platform to the other, without any reason other than to try to break the pressure of the heat.

The kids in the crowd clung lazily to their mothers’ pant-legs, trying to keep themselves from melting into the ground.

As people began to chat among themselves, the tickling nervousness in my stomach grew into a quiver, which then, as the hour approached, rose to a churning, biting ball of nausea. If it hadn’t been so sweltering hot I would have broken into a jog to keep the nervousness at bay, but since it was, I remained in my place, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, hoping that the time would approach soon.

And it did. Eleven o’ clock finally rolled around and as soon as the bells began to sound in the square, the sound of a vehicle could be heard coming from the west. The crowd immediately began to buzz. A cop car appeared, reflecting the white light of the sun, and came to a stop at the edge of the platform. Out of the driver’s and passenger’s sides emerged two cops. They moved to the back of the car and produced Andy, who had been handcuffed and dressed in white apparel that was almost blinding in the sun. He looked perfectly calm.

“Hey!” I shouted in his direction. He picked up the sound of my voice and his eyes darted around until he found me and gave me a smile. “What’s up, dude?” He shouted back. There was no fear in his voice.

“Not much,” I yelled. “You?”

I saw him shrug. “Same old thing!”

They made their way to the platform through the boisterous crowd. Some were yelling, others were laughing. Andy remained smiling through it all, his teeth whiter than the clothes he was wearing. From where I stood I couldn’t see his eyes, but his smile said it all.

They were on the platform now, and Andy was looking out into the crowd. The man in black came up behind Andy with a piece of cloth. Andy remained smiling as the cloth was looped around his eyes and tied in back. The crowd shouted even louder, and for a moment Andy swayed on the platform.

“Stay cool, Andy,” I said to him over the crowd.

“I’m cool, man.”

“Do you want a cigarette? They said you could have a cigarette if you wanted it.”

“Naw, I’m cool.”

At this point the crowd began to get antsy. The policemen left their positions and went out into the crowd, trying to calm the excitement, leaving only Andy and the man in black on the platform. Andy made no move to escape.

A news truck had pulled up and three men were busy setting up equipment. Andy would be getting news coverage. As the camera crew set up, a reporter, dressed rather unfittingly for the weather in a white suit, bustled through the hot crowd and singled me out. He shoved a pen and paper into my face, as if the words I would say would fall directly on the paper and spare him the energy of writing.

“What do you think of all this, son?” His voice was loud but muffled by the heat.

“I don’t know,” I said, shielding my eyes from the glare coming off of the reporter’s sunglasses.

“Do you feel like this is the right way to go about a situation like this?”

“There could be better ways.” He looked down scribbled something on his pad of paper, momentarily alleviating me of the glare from his sunglasses, but then looked back up to request another answer.

“Do you have sympathy for the man up there?”

“Which one?” I stared at him. The reporter gave me a look of reproach, as if I had ruined an entire day’s worth of journalistic effort. He realized he wouldn’t get another answer from me, so he sped off in a different direction, seeking out another victim.

A man wearing a white armband wove his way through the crowd and stood in front of me, blocking my view of the platform. I cleared my throat behind him and he moved on. After awhile I noticed a group of men wearing these same armbands making a round that snaked through the crowd and past me. I stopped one of them.

“Are you guys from Massachusetts?”

“Yes,” he said, not paying me much mind but instead focusing on where his companions were in the crowd.

“Why are you protesting?”

This time he glanced at me. “What’s not to protest? Don’t you think this is wrong?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I think it’s a little late to start protesting.”

He gave me the once-over, then looked away again. “There are a bunch of us back east. We’ve stopped hangings in our state and have almost stopped them in Vermont.”

“Sounds like you’re big back there.”

“We are. We’ve saved hundreds of lives. We can change things out here, too. It’s not too late.”

“It is for Andy,” I said.

“Who’s Andy?”

I stared at him. He looked at me again out of the corner of my eye, dropped his gaze, and then moved on, his banded arm raised to signal one of his companions.

The two policemen had returned to their positions on the platform, flanking Andy. The man in black lifted the noose. The crowd followed his hands. The man in black widened the loop so that it would fit, and then and lowered it around Andy’s neck like he was medaling him for the Olympics. Wear it proud, Andy, I thought. Then I laughed and shouted, “Wear it proud, man!”

“It’s all cool.” Andy had not moved and remained smiling. The man in black made his way from behind Andy to beside him and stood in position.

“Andrew Henry,” he said, addressing more the crowd than Andy himself. “For your violation of the fiction ban and the subsequent corruption the minds of seven children, you are to be put to death. We are obliged to grant you your last words.” He paused for a moment, then turned to Andy. “What have you got to say, anything?”

This was it, I thought, Andy’s last chance. I was expecting him to say something that would get him off—something that would save him. Andy was quiet. For the first time all day, a breeze swept through the square and for a moment the crowd forgot about Andy and bathed in the cool air. The breeze caught the ends of the cloth around his eyes. For a minute I thought it would blow off on Andy would be able to look out at us, but then it died down and with it rushed all the sound from the square. The crowd focused its attention back on Andy with agitated anticipation—they wanted him to say something so they could go back to their air-conditioning.

Finally, Andy spoke. “You know what two authors I always got mixed up?” he said after a moment. His teeth flashed in the sun, and his voice was a break in the pressure of the silence.  “Melville and Hemingway. Seems impossible, don’t it? They’re two completely different authors with two completely different styles. I guess it was the whole sea-themed business. Still, though…” He laughed. “Melville and Hemingway. Melville and Hemingway. Melville and Hem—” The boards slipped from under him and he dropped, the rope pulling taut around his neck, cutting off his sentence.

Poor E’raina…she asked for it! She got a myriad of wall posts from me a few days ago. This is what boredom does to me (almost comparable to that “Seuss on the Loose” poem thingy):

This story tells of my marriage to Peter and explains the reasons why I’m being fired from my job as dictator of Montana.

It was a sunny day in mid-June. I was being my usual masculine self and sipping brandy from a flask while watching my beautiful wife Nell (read: “Aneel”) bounce around playing tennis in my vast expanses of tennis courts. I, being very wealthy, owned seventeen tennis courts. And a small island off of China that had been given the name of “Japan” by the natives.

Around noon, I called to Nell to come in for tea. She skipped over to me, saying, “Oh my dear, what a wonderful life we lead. I do hope it goes on forever and ever.”

I reply: “Quite.”

She answers back with: “Indeed.”

About this time, a small fluttering of wings in the birdbath took my attention, and I, being pompous and full of brandy, swaggered over to the bath with an air of superiority to birds that all men—I feel—should possess. Upon reaching the birdbath my eyes struck a familiar sight—it was not your common, average bird; rather, it was a Montana Zipper-Back Dingle West from the state of a similar name (minus the Zipper-Back Dingle West) adjacent to us. With haste, I scooped the MZBDW into my hands. I had heard legends from the “Japanese” natives that these birds, when sung to by a beautiful woman, would lay eggs of pure gold. I had had the beautiful woman for years—and now, in my clutches, was the bird!

“My dear Nell!” I called, stumbling towards her over a hose and a servant. “Do you see what I have here? A Montana Zipper-Back Dingle West! My god! Do you know what this means?” As I rambled on about the unique properties of the bird, Nell was so kind to point out to me that the Japanese, being from Japan and not from Montana, would probably know little about a MZBDW, seeing as how they are not native to Japan nor do they have the flying capacity to cross oceans to get there.

I explained to the feeble-minded soul the idea that a Montanian, feeling a desperate need for a companion of a higher species than bovine, sailed to Japan in search of a woman, unknowingly with a MZBDW hidden within his trousers. Nell replied that this was certainly plausible, praised my reasoning and logistical skills, and promptly wished for me to come away to bed with her. I refused—the first time in my life!—and told her that more important things must be done.

I whisked her away, with the MZBDW in my hand, to the piano room, where 57 grand pianos stood waiting to be played. I knew not how to play the piano; nor did Nell. However, a servant named Chris (not to be confused with Nell’s late husband Christ) could peck out a rather charming little ditty he liked to call “Turkey in the Straw.” After summoning him, and after he warmed up with a few romps around the tennis courts, he sat to play. Nell, her voice soaring, began singing. I watched with eager eyes as the MZBDW surveyed the scene.

Now, unknown to me was the gender of this little bird—I had automatically assumed it being female, due, most likely, to my extreme want of golden eggs. However, as I came to find in a matter of minutes, this bird was in fact a male. The males of this species, as told to me by the Japanese natives, are said to, when sung to, have the ability to raise the dead. Not knowing the gender, as I stated before, I encouraged the little bird to flourish and to absorb Nell’s beautiful words with all its might!

It is difficult to say exactly what happened next. A flurry of feathers, a gust of wind, and a sudden break in Nell’s singing—what? you’ve stopped?—and a shriek from Chris so bone-rattling that I felt I’d just heard President Bush stumble yet again over the word “nuclear.”

At once I felt a sharp shove at my back—the breath knocked out of me, I staggered forward, nearly falling over Chris, who was terrified beyond all belief and white as a sheet. I turned to my assailant with mind to confront him, and at the moment my mind registered who he was, Nell shrieked at the top of her lungs, “Christ!”

It was indeed Christ. Nell’s late husband, dead at 30, hovered above me with eyes blank as steel and aura cold as ice. My thoughts flew not to myself, not to Nell, but to the little MZBDW—where was he? My eyes scanned the gusty room and focused in on the golden sphere of shuttering feathers on the piano. I felt one thing needed to be done, and one thing only.

“Christ!” said I, stepping with all my might into the gusts of winds emitting from his presence. “Do what you want with me…I have seen Nell, I have had Nell, she has served me well. Take her if you must. But please, Christ…spare this little bird. It does no harm, and it was my doing that caused him to summon you! Do what you wish of us humans, but spare that dear little Zipper-Back. That is all that I ask.”

Within moments, the gusting stopped. I had recoiled into a ball under a piano bench near to me, and failed to look up again until all had passed and the room stood quiet. Slowly, very slowly, I crept from beneath the bench. Nell was safe…she stood naked in the corner, weeping quietly, but with a metronome in her hands.

Chris had taken refuge in an old bass guitar case, his body now wedged within so tightly that he failed to be removed (such was his demise…but that is unimportant). I, not taking into account a minor injury to my shoulder, stood unhurt. Fearing the worst, I glanced at the piano on which I had last seen the MZBDW. It was not there. There was, however, in its place, a small piece of paper. I walked cautiously toward it. With a shaking hand, I picked it up and read it.

“To Japan.”

What transpired next was what was expected. Nell married Chris, I became an Atheist, and none of us ever played the piano again (save the gardener–we found him on several occasions dabbling with Mozart on the oldest piano in the room). The moral of this story is quite clear, and I feel it is in my best interest, as well as the interests of those involved, not to outrightly state it. If you know me, and if you know Nell, you will know the moral.

I know not how this story contributes to the explanation of my losing dictatorship of Montana or my marriage to one Peter. I know not why it is an important story, and I know not why I felt the need to tell it. And I fail to recognize, after all my years, the importance of geometric proofs.

But I leave you now, not as a simple man with simple pleasures and a simple wife, but as an owner of an MZBDW, owner of Japan, and proprietor of a small southwestern section of land in Montana I like to call “Outback Steakhouse.”

~The End~

Just don’t ask.