Expecting an early morning Amazon delivery box of “Remote” energy bars, the current fad among many tattooed health conscious Gen Z women, 22-year-old Nicole Sutton rushed to grab the latest food craze from the front steps. Dropping to her knees in a hurry she tore open the carton and dug into the pink tissue paper. Excited about new flavors to review online, she actually giggled.

A twisted wire coat hanger lay at the bottom of the carton.

“Mom!”

Rebecca Sutton stepped into the foyer from the kitchen, drying her hands on a damp dishtowel covered in red embroidered cardinals.

“What’s wrong now, Nikki?”

“What is this?”

“Where did you get it?”

“Amazon just delivered it!”

Rebecca walked to the box. She lifted the flaps. Lowering the cardboard wings she rolled her eyes.

“There’s no address, either yours or a return,” she said. “It’s not sealed. Amazon didn’t deliver this. Somebody else put the box on the porch.”

“What about my Remote bars, Mom?”

“Please walk Bailey,” Rebecca said. “He might have to poop.”

“Don’t expect me to pick it up and carry it home like a Boomer lady holding a designer purse,” Nicole said.

As soon as she opened the back screen door Nicole saw the red paper bag by the top porch step, a nice gift bag decorated with blue and green glitter and tied with a yellow ribbon. The top of a twisted wire coat hanger protruded from the top of the bag.

“Mom! Mom!”

“Somebody must be playing a trick on you,” Rebecca said.

“How do you know the joke’s on me?”

“I don’t for sure,” Rebecca said. “But you’re the only one living here who might engage in these kinds of childish antics. Like that stupid show you stream, is that what you call it, stream, and watch on your phone. What’s it called, Punked?”

Nicole kicked the bag and ran back into the house. Rebecca picked up the twisted wire coat hanger, turned and went inside to finish washing egg yolk off the breakfast dishes. Nicole ran to her room to text capital letter angst to her friends from work where she contracted as a receptionist trainee at a startup marketing firm called Zoomers that catered to people just like her.

A bright blue gift bag lay on her bed.

By the time Rebecca heard her daughter’s screams and got to the doorway, Nicole was dripping tears. Her breath came in spurts. All she could do was point to the bag. Nicole didn’t come down for dinner even though Rebecca made her favorite mac and cheese with extra crunchy maple bacon.

Nicole went to work at the startup in the morning. A supervisor called Rebecca on the landline phone at 9 a.m.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Sutton, but Nicole is having an episode worse than the others and we need somebody to come pick her up right away. We care about Nicole’s mental health here at Zoomers and want the best for her.”

“Her father will be right down,” Rebecca said.

That night James and Rebecca Sutton sat on the edge of the bed with Nicole who hugged a large 16-inch stuffed Chip the Beaver Squishmallow doll. Wrappers from the last of Nicole’s stockpile of cherry vanilla peanut butter Remote bars littered the floor. Billie Eilish sang about a bad guy in Nicole’s ear buds which she grudgingly removed when her parents entered the room.

“We made an early appointment with your therapist, honey,” Rebecca said. “She can see you first thing in the morning.”

After her parents tucked her in, Grandma Sutton appeared like a shriveled ghost in the doorway. With skin like a California raisin and a frail physique, Grandma never complained about dropping out of high school, working in a dress factory or anything else about the harsh life she led before marrying a fabric salesman who had health benefits and a life insurance policy. Grandma squeaked when she talked.

“Feeling better, sweetheart?”

“How did that hanger get in my room?”

“Somebody violated your privacy,” Grandma said.

“Who, Grandma? Why, Grandma?”

Grandma Sutton quietly closed the door behind her and stepped close to Nicole’s bed.

“Remember when you announced at the breakfast table how proud you were that you signed up to contribute money from each paycheck to your company’s political action fund to support a new state law that makes ending a pregnancy a felony?”

Grandma could barely hear Nicole’s response.

“To save the children,” she said.

Grandma stopped squeaking as her voice took on a thunderous tone.

“Remember when you said young women should go to prison for exercising their right to choose, yelling ‘lock her up, lock her up’ so loud you woke me from my nap?”

Nicole went pale.

“Abortion is murder,” she said.

“No,” Grandma said. “It’s not.”

Grandma Sutton gently pulled Chip the Beaver from Nicole’s arms and placed the stuffed animal facedown on the pillow. Pulling her hand from behind her back, Grandma waved a twisted wire coat hanger like a war club.

“You see this? My firstborn daughter, the aunt you never met and nobody talks about, bled to death after she used a coat hanger to end a pregnancy when she was about your age. Choice was even legal then. But she was embarrassed. Afraid. Felt alone. She didn’t have medical insurance. She didn’t have money and didn’t know where to go for help.”

Nicole grabbed Chip the Beaver and wailed.

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t,” Grandma said.

Nicole got even more frazzled.

“You’re bullying me,” Nicole said.

“I’m teaching you,” Grandma said. “Maybe one day you’ll understand what living in America as a woman truly means.”

Nicole buried her face in the squishy comfort of Chip the Beaver. Grandma gently took back the stuffed animal, cradling the soft figure in her arms and giving it a kiss.  

“New generations of women don’t talk about reproductive rights as often as they should,” Grandma said. “Silence that equals death is the elephant in the womb.”

Spread your wings and get ready to fly.

Swan Dive! begins serialization Wednesday, May 18, at theoutlawcorbett.com website with a new chapter of my latest genre-defying novel appearing each Wednesday. I’ll post each chapter on my Facebook page as well.

Disheveled senior citizen beach bum poet Sam Bennett serves as chief protagonist in this offbeat story set in 2022 Clearwater Beach, Florida, where personality disorders, pathologies and mental quirks are as plentiful as seagulls on the warm white sand. These majestic birds also play a major role in the story that revolves around bar regulars who hang out at RayRay’s Elbow Room.

Sam loves the gulls and wants to save them from harm. The gulls love Sam and want him to save them from harm.  But an evil Russian real estate developer loves neither. He promises harm to both Sam and the gulls.

So be on the lookout for Ivan Popov, a hulking, Siberian mercenary and wannabe mobster who connives at all costs to scoop up the most desirable properties on Clearwater Beach on behalf of his billionaire oligarch Cossack brother, Borys, who plans to illegally drill for gas and oil in the Gulf within sight of the beach.

Looking-for-love condo real estate agent Kim Phillips, secretive retired cop and New Jersey transplant Marty Burke, aspiring conservation scientist and save-the-planet eco-warrior Ruby Arenas and other Gulf of Mexico creatures both lovable and otherwise make up one spicy conch chowder of mad mavericks who live life their way.

Former Buffalo, New York, hockey enforcer and Elbow Room boss RayRay Gigliardi is nobody to mess with either. Neither is Dillon, the establishment’s wild green parrot mascot that roller- skates up and down the bar wearing an eye patch, cursing patrons for carving their initials into the wood and picking up tips in his beak. Prone to violence and anxiety attacks, Dillon maintains the makings of a real hero.

Especially beware of the unhinged Florida swamp born-and-raised Duval twins who seek fame and fortune as professional wrestlers and simply cannot be trusted..

Most of the characters in Swan Dive! try to save the world or at least make a better place of their little piece of ground. Most possess redeeming social value. Most make for good drinking buddies. Even if you don’t drink, you should at least be able to find one human strength or weakness in somebody’s life with which you can identify.

A mood-swingy pathological newspaper editor once told me she wouldn’t like me if I were a character in a novel. I took her slur on my personality as a compliment. The best representatives of our species sometimes possess volatile character traits. For the record, the editor had more in common with a troglodyte.

My writing life nowadays is rich.

Rather than engaging in the cluster**** of provincial local city, county, regional and state politics and getting nowhere, instead of writing news columns I’ll be writing more disturbing novels and extreme short stories that appeal to enlightened readers.

My Avventura Press publisher, my editor and I decided a few months ago to publish an updated second edition of Paddy’s Day in Trump Town. COVID in 2020 derailed and curtailed a noisy public book launch, a free-spirited promotional journey throughout the northeastern United States and even an Irish book tour.

But continuing COVID concerns have once again changed our plans. The pandemic is far from over. Neither is increasingly unmasked public ignorance about behaving as we must as good citizens engaged in protecting ourselves and others.

Enter Swan Dive!

This weird tale of saltwater intrigue draws from what I learned on many vacation trips to Clearwater Beach over the past several decades. My reality-based fiction provides an ink-smeared, red wine-stained postcard celebrating a last stand among local beachcombers who will always yearn for never-ending sunsets and good old days that have disappeared forever.

Traffic congestion, unsustainable development, environmental attacks, off-the-rails population growth and a lack of government solutions pose increasingly serious concerns for Clearwater Beach residents and visitors alike.

Still, our planet’s most decent inhabitants will continue to fight the onslaught of greedy marauders who want to destroy the world as they profit. The ongoing health of our environment and what’s left of our majestic earth must remain sacred.

Swan Dive! provides holy communion for kindred spirits.

Everybody deserves to soar.

So buckle up sky pilots.

Atmospheric conditions are about to get turbulent.

This ride’s gonna be bumpy.

The Mathew Street pub near the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England, looked like it always did.

From where Lucy Campbell sat at the bar she could see the door, warming herself in the glow of youthful memories that showcased John, Paul, Ringo and George racing in from the rain on any number of cold Saturday afternoons, laughing and shaking water from their mops of hair like they just stepped out of the bath.

Long gone, those fab days still soothed.

Sixty years later Lucy still kept her secret.

Nobody would believe how on separate days she went home with them all, one at a time, nothing bad about her behavior because she truly loved them all. And they loved her. At least that’s what they said.

Closing her eyes she heard a voice at the back of her mind.

“Remember all you Cave Dwellers. The Cavern is the best of cellars.”

Lucy would never forget club emcee Bob Wooler introducing the band, laughing in his rumpled roly-poly mild-mannered way. No matter how he dressed, Lucy always saw him as disheveled, not to be taken seriously, leftover like cold mushy peas in the icebox.

She never went home with Bob.

Now 80, Lucy sat alone one day each month she could afford to have a drink and a bag of crisps at the bar. The newer bartenders didn’t know her backstory and the older ones assumed if she was telling the truth she was just some sort of former groupie who at the very most only saw The Beatles perform live and in person and never actually met them. When she told the pub owner she knew The Beatles he laughed and said he knew Queen Elizabeth.

Nobody had any idea Lucy really knew The Beatles let alone spent time alone with each of the young rising stars. As far as she was concerned, and maybe she was right, she was the only woman in the world who spent intimate time with each of the boys. None of them would ever consider her a groupie. All of them would defend her honor.

Only Lucy Campbell knew for sure, nobody else because she hadn’t ever told anybody about her private magical mystery tour. That knowledge made her feel rich, wealthier than all the pub owners in Liverpool put together.

Richer even than the Queen.

Finishing her drink one afternoon she thought maybe now she’d be worth a color feature in the Sun tabloid newspaper whose editors might even pay her. But that would be cheap of her, to exploit and capitalize on her relationships with the four whose privacy she still respected with all her heart. Who would believe her? Besides, what did her matters of the heart matter? Today’s young would pity her, make fun of her, disbelieve her and not even come close to understanding, knowing what those brilliant days were like, what the birth of real music meant or how Beatlemania truly changed the world.

Lucy Campbell knew.

Settling in beneath soft colorful quilts in her one-room bedsitter with the smallest fireplace where she burned newspapers for heat and drank tea naked with John, Paul, Ringo and George was better than sleeping with Jesus. The Beatles played the Cavern 294 times. Lucy estimates she attended 150 performances and caught them at their most innocent moments. Jesus didn’t show up at the club once. John was right. They were more popular than the Savior.

Life unfolded differently then. Mods and rockers, flowered bell bottoms and Puff the Magic Dragon inspired Lucy to want to live forever. Now she sensed forever is too long. Forever no longer existed. Forever is gone forever.

“C’mon, love, finish your drink unless you want another,” the barman said.

Shy and embarrassed, Lucy had enough money to pay for the one black currant and lemon plus a tip. Sliding slowly off the stool, she stooped to pick up her umbrella beside her feet when she got dizzy and fell. The voice she heard this time sure didn’t belong to Bob Wooler.

“Buy me a pint, Princess,” the man said.

Knowing only one man ever called her Princess, Lucy covered her mouth with both hands.

“But you’re…”

“Not today, I’m not. Just knocking about with this hooligan,” John said.

“I’m just back from India,” George said.

“You’re also …”

“I’d say we’re all alive and well today, Lucy,” George said.

“I can’t believe you’re both here,” Lucy said.

“You as well,” John said, his black leather jacket shining in the pulsing light of flashing green and red neon beer signs, his hair bouncing in his eyes as he leaned over to kiss Lucy on the cheek.

George seemed apprehensive.

“Does John know?”

“No and neither do you, George,” Lucy said.

John cocked his head, inquisitive as he lit an English Oval cigarette.

“What? What? Do I know what?”

Now George seemed truly puzzled.

“Not with John you didn’t, Lucy, did you?” he said.

“She did,” John said.

“With George, as well,” Lucy said to John. “Now who’s going to buy me a nice black currant and lemon?”

After the initial shock, that’s the way time unfolded with George and John lovingly rushing about to wait on Lucy even after she sheepishly told one about the other. They understood. How could either of them have resisted her charm?

“Wait until Paul hears,” George said. “He’ll go bananas.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said. “Well, actually you do. You two are only the half of it.”

John howled with laughter.

“Half? Me and George? That’s half? Paul and Ringo, too?”

“Yes, those two as well,” Lucy said. “You two and those two make quite a fab foursome.”

“Wait until they find out,” George said.

John grew serious.

“Hopefully that won’t happen for a long while,” he said.

Off in the distance Lucy heard a siren. She opened her eyes. Turning her head, she felt a warm puddle on the floor beneath her ear. Closing her eyes she heard sitar music. Lucy saw diamonds in the sky.

“Queer old bird said she knew The Beatles,” the barman said.

“I know bloody Queen Elizabeth, too,” the pub owner said.

Two Russian combat veterans wearing full dress uniforms, gold medals and bright red campaign ribbons walk into the plush bar of the private officers’ club in Moscow. Their leader’s state funeral has just ended.

”Vodka,” says Lev.

“Vodka,” says Boris.

Lev’s humming a tune.

Stone-faced, Boris questions his comrade.

“What’s that song?”

“Billy Joel,” Lev says. “We didn’t start the fire.”

Russia didn’t start the fire. The United States of America started the fire. The military officers swallow shots of the liquor that’s as cold as a Siberian stare. War is hell, of course. America loves fanning the flames of eternal immolation.

“Looks like the Kremlin will move forward with the strike,” says Boris.

After the Ukrainians sunk the warship Moskva, the Mariupol setbacks and unexpected resistance on the road to Kiev, as a display of power national decision-makers quickly and unanimously agreed on retribution for their president’s drone assassination. To not let the world know Russia still means business would signal the end of the motherland.

“More vodka,” Lev says.

“More,” says Boris.

Both men exhale loudly.

“To our murdered ruler,” says Lev.

“Our commander’s fighting spirit will live forever,” says Boris.

Two gulps provoke Boris to pour two more shots they quickly swallow.

“One bomb is all we need,” says Boris.

Lev isn’t sure.

“That’s all it will take?”

Boris recites an online Wikipedia citation he memorized to show Lev just how smart he is.

Standing at attention he says: “Kyiv is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in northcentral Ukraine along the Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the seventh-most populous city in Europe.”

“I heard the population increased to 3.3 million,” Lev says. “And half of those Nazis left in the past few weeks,”

“So how many vermin must we exterminate?”

“I’m no good at math,” Lev says. “Let’s say two million.”

“Like I said, one bomb,” Boris says. “Remember Little Boy and Fat Man?”

Lev gets so excited when he speaks white spittle appears at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes, America killed 70,000 to 135,000 in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people in Nagasaki,” he says.

Boris bellows to the bartender.

“Two more vodkas.”

“No,” Lev says. “Bring the bottle.”

“I can drink more vodka than you,” Boris says.

“You might die trying,” says Lev.

Boris raises his voice and his refill.

“To the American firebombing of Tokyo,” he says.

“Yes, yes,” Lev says. “America killed more than 90,000 and possibly over 100,000 Japanese people, mostly civilians, and one million left homeless in the most destructive single air attack in human history!”

Pouring more vodka, the Russians gobble slices of pickled cucumber and toast white hot incendiary bombs.

“Always remember our biggest bomb is better than the American dog firecracker,” Boris says.

“Tsar Bomba,” Lev says.

“Here’s to October 30, 1961,” Boris says.

On that day the Soviet Union tested the most powerful nuclear weapon ever exploded, north of the Arctic Circle on the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya.

“Fifty megatons,” Boris says. “About 3,300 times more powerful than the 15 kilotons nuclear weapon USA dropped on Hiroshima.”

Lev shouts, drawing laughs and attention from other officers in the room.

“To Tsar Bomba, the king of bombs!”

More vodka brings more fire in their bellies. More vodka brings more vodka. In Russia, escalation is the name of the game. The Soviet Union will rise again.

“Another bottle, comrade,” says Boris.

The bartender brings a frosty quart and pours two drinks. The Russian officers hold their glasses up to sunshine streaming through stained glass windows bearing images of a double-headed eagle, a hammer and sickle and several gold stars.

“I am ready for anything,” says Lev. “Let us toast the end of the world.”

“Sooner than we think, perhaps,” says Boris.

Lev puts his arm around Boris’ shoulders.

“So,” he says. “Was Hiroshima a war crime?”

“Ask Billy Joel,” says Boris.

Selected amid cheers by colleagues who respected Max Shuler immensely, the government chosen one prepared for a big day the assembled experts agreed was anything but another day at the office.

“You get to push the button, Dr. Shuler,” a normally stern female physicist said.

“Please,” he said. “Call me Max.”

After an elite group of NATO leaders chose an intelligence team to scope out the mission, thanks to Max this crack recon unit surprised themselves by locating the target’s whereabouts in less than a week. They turned over their findings to a drone death squad Max now headed that represented six nations that assembled and prepared to deliver death from above.

Max Shuler knew the hit would be easy. As a seasoned pro with high-profile kills in Afghanistan and Iraq (what he laughingly called surgical strikes), he looked forward to the Moscow strike considering how the target had been asking for it and clearly deserved what Max called “the end time.”

“Five vehicles comprise his convey,” Max said. “We only hit the target.”

A colleague with eyes the color of freshly laid robin’s eggs questioned his decision.

“Why not kill them all?”

“I’m a Catholic,” Max said.

“Just war theory?”

“Yes,” Max said. “A sin is not a sin if it erases a greater sin.”

“So the Pope will understand?”

“Who better than Francis knows the history of his own church?”

“We’re all war drones,” the colleague said. “Human war drones.”

“Roger that.”

Max loved using military jargon. The black jumpsuit uniforms he requested for the assassination team and the unique project patch stitched on members’ shoulders announcing “Operation White Lightning” excited him as well. A skeleton holding a shot glass presumably filled with Russian vodka defined the surreal symbolism of the insignia Max wore at the pinnacle of his public service career.

Looking for life on Mars thrilled him when he worked for “Project Lost Worlds,” but finalizing a solution to preserve life on earth most inspired this career killer who on the weekends read and reread Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels while eating barbecue potato chips and drinking Colt .45 Malt Liquor from the can.

“Shaken, not stirred,” Max joked to Natasha, his wife.

At 6 a.m. on a bright spring Tuesday morning, Max sat before a massive color console mounted on the front wall of the secret underground bunker in rural Pennsylvania near the Gettysburg battlefield and the home of former President Ike Eisenhower. The five other team members sat stiffly in ergonomic swivel chairs behind their leader. Two of those five believed in God. None of the squad experienced second thoughts. Max rolled his shoulders like a heavyweight boxing champion before a title fight.

Resembling the beginning of a violent video game, the screen came to life with movement from a convoy of five black vehicles including two limos, two Mercedes sedans and a smaller car bearing the Russian leader. The trip began from a walled mansion about six kilometers from the Kremlin. No traffic in front. No traffic behind. The cars maintained the municipal speed limit.

“Music,” Max said.

A loud mix began: first, the grim sounds of a Russian death dirge followed by traditional German hiking music, a polka, the Star Spangled Banner and John Lennon singing “Imagine.”

“My wife likes the Beatles,” said a former Nobel Prize finalist and neurosurgeon team member with clandestine experience in surreptitious brain chip insertion, an up-and-coming concentration among surgeons recruited for black operations in which a surprising number of nations now expressed interest.

A thin set of crosshairs appeared at the center of the wall-sized video screen.

“Close up,’ Max said.

As the image zoomed in, Max saw the recognizable white face in the window. Beady dark eyes below a receding hairline blinked in a pasty oval face. Taking hold of the joystick with his left hand, Max ran his thumb back and forth across the top of the smooth chrome control, reminding him of the eight-ball gear shift on the vintage 1966 three-speed Mustang convertible he kept in the garage until the weather got better and he could cruise with The Beach Boys playing on the pristine 8-track tape player he cherished from the good old days.

Pulse steady.

A wry smile.

Exhale.

The free world’s most current pressing threat disappeared in a black and red explosion of smoke and fire.

At the morning meeting one of team drone’s three women gently laid her hand on Max’s shoulder.

“I bet you wish you could tell the world what you have accomplished,” she said.

“No country or individual takes credit or blame,” Max said.

“Of course we disavow all knowledge, but you saved the world,” she said.

“Our former target has daughters,” Max said.

“Yes,” the woman said. “He did.”

After dinner Thursday night the phone rang in Max’s spacious study furnished with handsome mahogany bookshelves and comfortable oxblood easy chairs that shined behind closed hand-carved pocket doors off the dining room.

“I’ll get it, honey,” Max said.

The international caller didn’t even say hello.

“When are you going to get me out of Russia?”

“Soon.”

“Just last week I got a big black Z tattoo on my shoulder like we paint on the tanks. That should draw some unwanted attention on American beaches with everybody there rooting for Ukraine.”

“Tell the sand bunnies you’re a Zorro fan.”

“Zorro who?”

“Never mind.”

“I’m serious, Max. I gave you top secret coordinates to make the hit. I was in the limo right behind him. Like Tony Soprano says, ‘Badabingbadaboom!’ ”

“You’re shamefully obsessed with 21^st Century American pop culture garbage.”

“The motherland’s young crave McDonald’s, Saturday Night Live, Beyoncé.”

“Russia possesses deep, rich history you should embrace.”

“Like my big sister does? How is Miss Saint Petersburg 2015, anyway?”

“Be respectful of my wife or I might tell some KGB veterans I know you ratted out the big man.”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“I’m not joking.”

At the Pentagon Monday morning Max washed his face in the conference room bathroom near his office. When he returned to his desk, Space Force Lieutenant General Charles Reynolds was sitting in Max’s green leather chair with his ankles crossed and gleaming paratrooper boots resting on the desk.

“Have a little respect, Charlie,” Max said.

“You’re moving to Utah,” the three-star general said.

“Why?”

“Better than solitary confinement at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado.”

“That’s for criminals.”

“You broke the law, Max. NSA surveillance picked up your phone call yesterday with your Russian wannabe hipster brother-in-law. When we say no communication, we mean no communication.”

“He called me.”

“You told us your extermination informant was Russian special forces.”

“True.”

“You didn’t say you’re related by marriage and promised to relocate the Russkie bastard here.”

“You’re talking about my brother-in-law, Charlie. The kid visited Atlantic City last summer. Now he wants to be a citizen. He wants to vote. Get into politics.”

“You didn’t say the informant knew the United States of America orchestrated and carried out the executive termination. We were going to blame Iceland if it came to that. So what if they nuked Reykjavik in retaliation?”

“We never would have located the target without the little shit.”

“We never would have found our weak link without him, either.”

“My wife’s brother was our ace in the hole, Charlie. We owe him.”

The general’s expression went stiff.

“America owes nobody.”

The Shuler residence landline rang early Saturday morning.

“Mrs. Shuler?” said a man speaking with a thick Cossack dialect. “We have some bad news for you about your late brother.”

Max checked into the Times Square hotel by noon. The telephone number for The New York Times international editor was more difficult to get than he thought.

“My name is Max Shuler,” he said when the editor answered. “Do I have a story for you.”

Cold words blew in one ear and out the other, benumbing Kim’s brain like a forgotten bag of peas stuck in the ice at the back of the freezer.

“I’m Becky,” the voice said.

“We need to relax, Kim,” the voice said. “I’ll meet you at RayRay’s Elbow Room for Happy Hour.”

Sure enough, Becky showed up at the Clearwater Beach bar for cocktails and fresh smoked fish spread.

Nobody but Kim could hear Becky. The doctor said Kim wasn’t crazy. Becky agreed. She wasn’t nuts and even the brain specialist said the voice was real to Kim. But the doctor did have questions.

“Who told you her name is Becky?”

“She did,” Kim said.

Scientists agree some people hear a voice or voices without being mentally ill. Voices seem to come out of nowhere, but what causes them? Whose voices are they? What could Kim do to silence this eerie vocalization she carried around each day like the fake alligator skin briefcase she depended on for her job selling used condos on the beach?

Kim decided to start a conversation with Becky.

“Who are you really?

“Your soul sister.”

“I don’t have a sister.”

“You do now.”

At 52 working real estate sales made Kim’s feet hurt. She was getting too old for the constant smiles that made her face hurt. Living alone made her heart hurt. She should own a dog but dreaded the thought of picking up and putting foul crap in little bags.

“So get out of the real estate business,” Becky said.

“Are you going to pay my condo mortgage and yearly maintenance fee? My Jeep payment? You going to buy papaya jam for my toast?”

 “I have enough problems,” Becky said.

She did, too.

Even voices sometimes hear voices. At the time nobody but Becky knew about Tara and Shannon, two drunken twin sisters who lived in her head even though she lacked a head. Nobody knew how they plagued her as daily eruptions of psychic disorder. Tara and Shannon stayed awake all night arguing and wailing like banshees whenever their psychological problems overwhelmed them. Becky tried to referee but always failed. All she could hope for was a level of intoxication so severe the colleens, as they called themselves, eventually fell asleep. Despite Becky trying to shield Kim from continuous bedlam, Kim heard the incessant bickering that made her lose hope.

With Tara and Shannon now calling most of the shots in more ways than one (Jameson, Bushmills, Paddy and Powers) and making Becky press Kim to join them more and more often for strong drinks and even pot parties, Kim just rode the wave like a stoned surfer on a tsunami to Hell. Kim, normally a social drinker partial to Chablis or chilled prosecco, now lived on the edge, too often drunk, depressed and terribly hung over when pointing out the beauty of a gray granite countertop in a waterfront condominium.  

Perhaps the deafening auditory hallucinations Kim heard every day defined her conscience, a blurred guiding light testing her, a psychic force of nature walking with her down uncertain forked roads of life.

Probably not.

Your conscience is you, not some voice or voices separate from you. Like when you’re thinking, that’s you thinking, not somebody else inhabiting your head. Your mind is your mind, right, unless you lose it. Then your mind no longer belongs to you. The hospital owns it. The government owns it. The scientific community owns it. Still, several competent doctors said Kim hadn’t lost her mind and wasn’t suffering a nervous breakdown.

One Sunday morning while Kim made scrambled eggs and vegan sausage, getting ready to settle in for the day with the newspaper, Tara interrupted, slurring her words and taunting.

“What, no liverwurst with those yolks?”

Kim jumped like somebody snuck up behind her and fired a gun beside her ear.

Tara shrieked.

“I always ate my liver.”

“Wait, what?”

Now Shannon howled.

“We always ate our liver.”

Kim trembled while vegan sausage links sizzled and burned in the pan.

Becky tried to help.

“Ignore them,” she said.

Kim went back to bed to try to forget.

Becky heard Kim crying.

“What’s the matter?”

“I‘m afraid of them,” Kim said.

 “They’re just figments of your imagination,” Becky said. “Like me.”

“They remind me of my mother,” Kim said.

“Took you long enough to figure that out,” Becky said. “Your German mother even terrorized your poor hapless father.”

Kim felt cold, sick to her stomach, lightheaded. Becky’s voice dropped to a gentle tone sweet as raisin pudding when she asked her most probing question.

“Do you remember when your mother locked you in the closet each Thursday night for a month for not eating the liver she made every Thursday for dinner?”

“Liver made me sick,” Kim said.

“Your mother was so upset she wanted to kill you.”

“I begged her to understand.”

“That first night your raving maniac of an Irish father got so mad screaming you should NEVER talk back to your mother, he knocked over his beer.”

Kim now remembered how every Thursday night at dinner for a year the old man screamed until she froze and once wet herself in her chair. Instead of ordering Kim to her room her mother locked the child in the closet off the small downstairs bathroom. One night during her imprisonment Daddy died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Mother said it was a firecracker when Kim screamed.

Kim moved out as soon as she turned 18.

“I was so scared all the time,” Kim said.

“You needed a friend,” Becky said.

“Maybe you can be my friend,” Kim said.

“You need to befriend yourself first,” Becky said.

“Even at my age?”

Becky spoke with confidence.

“Talk back to Tara and Shannon. Just don’t listen anymore. Put those voices in their places. You be the liver on their dinner plates.”

The next time Tara showed up to mock Kim, the frazzled Florida realtor garnered all the courage she possessed and spoke in a firm, steady tone.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

The tense few seconds that passed felt like an hour.

“What did you say?”

“I said back off.”

Shannon jumped in like a faded tattooed tag team wrestler.

“You shut up!”

“No, thank you, I won’t shut up. I’ll politely hear you out and then do as I please. You know there’s something seriously wrong with you, right?”

Becky whispered.

“Nobody ever talks to them like that.”

The twins roared at the same time.

“Eat your liver! Don’t talk back to your mother!”

It wasn’t like an exorcism or anything, but for the next two weeks the two demons tried their best and failed to commandeer Kim’s brain. In the end they simply tired themselves out. One day they moved out and disappeared, leaving Kim and Becky alone.

Kim took a week off and went back to work refreshed as she showed one and two-bedroom luxury homes by the Gulf of Mexico, enjoying Happy Hour wine spritzers at Ray Ray’s Elbow Room where KK, Canadian Mike, Chris and the rest of the staff welcomed her each night like royalty. Stone crab claws were Kim’s favorite. RayRay offered no liver on the menu.

In March Kim sold a record three waterfront condos in Belleair Beach. Every now and then she talked to Becky, not much, though, only when she needed a special friend to listen. Becky never talked back.

When she did, of course, Kim listened.

At 63 the pale skin on Ronnie Kohr’s face looked like construction putty. Full cheeks felt like a doughy version of a wax museum dummy. Without the money to fly to Mexico for a full-scale face transplant, the professional Elvis impersonator knew he was finished.

Laid off from the pest control company after working off and on in the entertainment business for decades (at the age of three Ronnie Kohr’s mother Grace billed him as the youngest Elvis clone in the world), at least he still got a local gig or two around Christmas at the VFW or Legion hall. During his career Ronnie Kohr played small events in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and all points in between, including his high point sold-out concert in a bar in State College during the 1986 national championship football season.

Once when Ronnie was 14, he performed two great nights and four shows at a Tupperware convention in Las Vegas. Grace easily secured an annulment for Ronnie’s Elvis Chapel marriage to a pain pill addicted showgirl with one phone call to the woman’s husband who worked as a Las Vegas police officer. No bigger Elvis fan than Grace lived and she often told anybody who would listen how divine intervention blessed her with a son the Tarot card reader at the mall told her actually was Elvis in a past life.

“A sign,” she said, “a sign.”

Over the years Ronnie matured. The act got better. But in 2001 he started putting on some serious weight.

At least he kept his standards intact. In 2019 he turned down an offer to do a “nude Elvis” event that would have put $250 in his pocket for a three-hour show that would have left him singing wearing only his sideburns and white patent leather shoes. An undyingly polite Ronnie Kohr declined the offer even when the treasurer of the businesswomen’s association organizing the party offered $300. What would Ronnie’s dearly departed mother say had he agreed to put his hunka hunka burning love on display?

When COVID hit Ronnie got stuck home practicing his karate moves in the living room until he got hurt. A simple front snap kick tangled his foot in the leg of his bell bottom pajamas, tripped him and sent a tooth through his lip when he hit the coffee table face first. To make matters worse, the wound injured his sneering lip, the one that curled when he smiled and spoke in his perfect Elvis accent. Now his words sounded garbled, like a drunken imitation of a redneck salesman selling used pickups in Memphis.

For the next two weeks Ronnie pampered himself to heal, increasing his two daily peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwiches to four, eating one with his breakfast of bacon, eggs and bacon, one with deep-fried pickles covered in hot sauce for lunch, one with a man-sized dinner of chicken fried steak and gravy with black-eyed peas and one with sugar, cinnamon and whipped cream before bed. Sometimes Ronnie ate two bananas per sandwich which he figured is what sent his potassium levels off the charts. With a level of 6.3, six being fatal, doctors told Ronnie he should be dead by yesterday.

So he tried to change.

Ronnie really tried to change.

But by 2022 he weighed 360 pounds, ten pounds more than Elvis did when he died at 42.

The 21^st Century bode bad news for the future, far worse than the disco era when the King passed. Back then Ronnie looked real good. By the time he turned 19 he was dating a friend of his mother who managed a beer distributor that specialized in German brews. Young Ronnie drank like a Danube river carp and never performed onstage without bock beer on his breath.

When he met Rayleen that summer she didn’t drink. Working as the beer distributor’s young divorcee cashier subjected the young woman to flirtation, insult and even intimidation. That’s where Ronnie Kohr came in stepping through the doorway in a blue track suit with a gold stripe down the side and black Flagg Brothers’ shoes with Cuban heels and white leather lightning bolts on the sides. A svelte 195 pound light-heavyweight, he spotted a roofer tanned bronze and skinny as a rusty nail leaning over the counter asking Priscilla for a kiss.

Rayleen just turned 23 but Ronnie saw her as a 14-year-old named Priscilla wearing a black beehive hairdo and sporting a Munich accent which was really just Pennsylvania Dutch from Lebanon, PA, where she grew up. Elvis’ Priscilla was American and spoke perfectly despite being born in Brooklyn. Ronnie loved watching Rayleen ring up cases and kegs.

Pulling a derringer-shaped cigarette lighter with a fake pearl handle from his pocket, Ronnie lit a thin anisette-flavored cigarillo. Stepping toward the roofer he cleared his throat. Spotting the lighter and taking it for a real gun, the hungover roofer fled.

Rayleen blew Ronnie a kiss.

“My hero,” she said.

Three days later Rayleen moved to Florida with the contractor who put up the new drywall at the beer distributorship. A week later Ronnie rescued a stray cat from the Forever Care Paw Foundation. He named her Priscilla. A week later he rescued a stray kitten from the same shelter he called Lisa Marie. Until both famously-named felines ran away within a day of each other a few years later, they all lived together like one big happy family in Ronnie’s late mother’s one-story red brick house along the highway that paralleled the railroad tracks that paralleled the river.

After that, just like Elvis, Ronnie hated cats. He disliked women, too. For the record, Ronnie’s dad Ronnie Sr. died when he slammed drunk into the back of an ambulance stopped at a red light the day before his son was born. With his last words before he died, Ronnie Sr. whispered to the emergency room nurse that he had a baby boy on the way, a son who would be born with sideburns. Deep down as an underground septic tank, though, Ronnie loved everybody. In subsequent years, when Ronnie sang the words “always on my mind” he thought of his mom, his cats and his dead daddy, too.

For three hours last Tuesday Ronnie sat on the toilet waiting to die, reading Frank Adams’ “The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus,” the same book Elvis was reading when he keeled over and fell from the throne. What a way to go. Ronnie envisioned paramedics struggling to roll him onto a stretcher. He could hear county morgue workers mocking his corpse, hearing their cruel laughter so much so he kept his silver aviator shades on in the shower that night to give the folds of his belly a darker shade that didn’t make his middle look so thick.

The Elvis angel showed up at the door the next morning.

“My name is Ginger,” she said. “Would you be interested in buying a set of cyclopedias?”

A sign.

A woman named Ginger waited in a king-sized Graceland bed for Elvis the night he took his last breath on the bathroom floor. The face of that woman was exactly who Ronnie saw when the saleslady stood on the cinderblock front steps. He knew it wasn’t the same Ginger, of course, but if he could dream, and he could, the spirit was hers.

“These ain’t Britannia cyclopedias,” Ginger said. “But just as good.”

Ronnie acted interested in the pitch.

“I have the first book, A, of the 26 volumes with me,” Ginger said.

“There’s 26 letters in the alphabet,” Ronnie said.

“You’re real smart already,” Ginger said. “You might not even need the books.”

“Thank you very much,” Ronnie said.

Each volume contained around 100 pages and you could buy them individually at select supermarkets.

“The set comes in paperback, too,” Ginger said.

“Maybe I can get one to keep in the Caddy,” Ronnie said.

“You have a Cadillac?”

“Two of them, a red 1978 El Dorado and a 1956 hearse.”

“You got it made in the shade,” Ginger said.

Of course he didn’t and still owed money on both cars.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a full set of cyclopedias with me,” Ginger said.

“That’s OK,” Ronnie said. “I’m not playing with a full deck, either.”

Even the freight train loaded with coal rattling by couldn’t drown the sweet harmony of their laughter.

“So I’ll see you tomorrow when you come back with the books and the paperwork,” Ronnie said

Ginger blushed.

“You’ll be my first full sale,” she said.

Now Ronnie flushed.

But Ginger reddened even more deeply.

“Can I ask a favor?”

“Shoot,” Ronnie said.

“Can I have your autograph?”

People didn’t ask Ronnie for autographs anymore.

Ronnie got real serious.

“How old are you?”

“I’m 42,” Ginger said.

Ginger was 21 years younger, the same age difference between Elvis and his Ginger.

Ronnie bit his sneering lip to keep from crying.

When Ginger returned the next day to sign the paperwork, Ronnie, having just ironed his best black and red jump suit, answered the door in full regalia, including cubic zirconia diamonds on every finger and a freshly dyed black pompadour.

“You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away,” Ronnie said, speaking a real live Elvis quote.

Confused, Ginger stumbled over her words like a country diner waitress tripping over a dropped platter of blackened catfish with hush puppies on the side.

“What ain’t going away?”

“Tenderness,” Ronnie said.

Ginger moved in the following Saturday, bringing her stuff in beer boxes from the motel by the truck stop where she was staying and paying $400 a week with no pets allowed.

“I’m allergic to cat and dog hair and peanuts,” she said.

With no peanut butter in the house, Ronnie laid off the bananas and bacon, too. You’d be amazed at how much weight he lost in the next few months, especially when Ginger taught him some yoga moves that strengthened his knees and allowed him to kick hard enough to make the fabric at the ends of his bell bottoms snap like a turtle before going into the soup.

Last week out of nowhere the social worker at the senior citizens center called because “The Human Eightball” cancelled her appearance to check into alcohol rehab and asked if Ronnie was available for a Friday night show.

“You’ll be much younger than our mostly female audience,” the social worker said. “They think you’re hot off the Ed Sullivan Show.”

“I won’t swivel,” Ronnie said.

“With these old girls you can swivel all you want, just duck when they throw their room keys at you,” the social worker said.

After the show, which, as you might expect, was a hit, Ginger asked Ronnie to marry her.

“Thank you very much,” he said.

“Oh, Elvis,” she said.

“I’m getting bad as the president,” Justin said.

Lisa looked up from the sink where she struggled to scrub barbecue shredded pork grease from the supper dishes.

“Germs,” Justin said. “I’m worried about germs like Trump.”

“Yeah, Trump’s a germ all right,” Lisa said.

“No I mean the president’s a germaphobe. So’s Biden from what I hear. Can’t say I blame either one.”

“Oh, honey, you just got back from your yearly doctor’s checkup, that’s all.”

“No, it’s worse than that,” Justin said.

Watching her now he noticed she only used one squirt of lemon dishwashing liquid on the sponge. He would have used three or four, maybe. And he wouldn’t use the fruit-scented stuff. He’d use some kind of extra strength bleach-based detergent or one with ammonia in it if you could buy such a thing. He wouldn’t use a sponge, either. You might as well scrub germs off your dinner plates with a petri dish loaded with Escherichia coli bubbles.

“E. coli,” he said.

Stopping in mid-scrape, Lisa scrunched a puzzled look on her face.

“You might as well ladle bugs on the dinnerware like gravy,” he said.

Embarrassed, Lisa wasn’t sure what to say.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Turning abruptly, Justin stormed into the bathroom to wash his hands. Pulling down and using four squares of toilet paper to touch the faucets for the right blend of hot and cold water, he worried about picking up the bar of soap that lay in a glass dish shaped like a seashell Lisa bought at a Gen X hipster shop downtown. Spotting the quarter-inch mud smear, he knew Lisa must have last washed her hands after gardening that afternoon and contaminated the Dove with a streak of real outdoor germ-infested backyard dirt. Without turning off the water he bolted back into the kitchen where he caught Lisa off guard while she wiped her hands on the dishtowel.

“You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”

Before she could ask if he lost his mind, Justin was back in the bathroom, this time locking the door behind him. Justin’s condition didn’t happen overnight. For the past few weeks he felt germs looking at him, crawling on his arms during the day, sometimes walking on his legs in the morning or when they woke him up at night sashaying up and down his back like fashion models on the runway. Germs looking at him bothered him the most because they could see him but he couldn’t see them. It was only a matter of time before he encountered one face-to-face in the living room while he was watching the Discovery Channel on television.

Lisa’s light tap on the door startled him.

“Are you OK, Justin?”

Checking his watch he knew he’d been in the bathroom a long time. Turns out 20 minutes had passed from the time he first sensed germs on the bar of soap and Lisa‘s halting knock.

“I’m washing my hands,” Justin said.

“Just checking,” she said.

Twenty minutes later, she knocked again.

“You’re starting to worry me,” she said. “At least unlock the door.”

As he was turning the lock he saw a germ the size of a pepper fleck wearing what looked like a crewcut jump off the wall before it disappeared behind the shower curtain. In a panic Justin looked under the sink for the plunger. He had to fight back. Facing the shower curtain, his left leg began to shake. His fingers trembled. Tightening his grip on the plunger, with one hand he tore open the curtain, ripping it from several plastic rings. Jumping onto the edge of the tub he raised the plunger.

There they were, about 12 more germs, round buggers with legs, beady eyes and vicious scowls, hanging out by the drain mocking him like an outlaw motorcycle club taunting a weak potential victim while pounding down beers at a bucket-of -blood hillbilly bar. Backing up, Justin opened the door and eased slow motion into the hall.

Lisa met him with a lemon sponge cake in her hands.

“Surprise,” she said. “Your favorite dessert.”

Justin raised the plunger over his head.

Lisa held up the cake like a battle shield.

“Lemon, huh? Like the dishwashing liquid? Sponge cake, Lisa? Like a homemade treat designed for culturing bacteria and other microorganisms? Do you have any pathogen loaded botulism whipped cream to go with it?”

“It’s only a cake, honey, dessert.”

Justin was still holding the plunger when police pulled up beside him at midnight parked outside the high school where he graduated in 1982 and taught biology for the past 30 years.

“I plead self-defense, officer,” Justin said.

The cop looked puzzled.

“For what?”

“Breaking into the chemistry lab.”

“What did you do that for?”

“I needed to cook up an antidote for the pestilence.”

“You mean the pandemic?”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah that’s getting to everybody,” the cop said.

“I mixed a batch of antitoxin to kill germs,” Justin said.

“Think it will work?”

“Somebody’s got to try,” Justin said.

“There you go, Mr. Good Citizen. More people need to get involved in their communities,” the cop said. “Make it like the America we grew up in.”

Justin sensed an ally and went for broke.

“Is there a chance you have an extra pair of them gloves you’re wearing?”

“Always” the cop said. “I wear the disposables because I don’t want to touch the criminals when I yank them out of the car. You never know what you might catch.”

“Exactly,” Justin said.

The cop peeled off the throwaway gloves.

“You can have these if you give me a jar of that bug neutralizer cure,” he said.

“You got yourself a deal, partner,” Justin said.

When the cop snapped a salute and pulled away, Justin drank from the magic potion that would protect him in a world full of germs. You can’t be too careful. Justin put on the gloves. Watching the cop disappear in the rearview mirror Justin felt safe from germs for the first time all day.

Say what you will about police brutality, in this case at least somebody understood.

Lisa would just have to get her own damn gloves.

“Here’s more bottles, mama,” Kateryna said.

Svitlana reached for three empties her daughter held out.

Marveling at his family over a flickering blue flame that lit his last cigarette, Andriy crumpled and stuffed the pack in his down jacket pocket. Exhaling white smoke through his nose he spoke to Kateryna in a voice as low as his mood.

“Don’t you have ballet practice?”

The child looked at the linoleum floor.

“I forget how to dance,” she said.

“You’re upset,” Svitlana said. “When this is over you’ll remember every step.”

Jerking her head toward her husband Svitlana snapped words like whiplash.

“Watch that cigarette.”

Andriy pointed to a dozen more bottles on the floor.

“Where’d you learn to make petrol bombs?”

“Natalka next door,” Svitlana said. “I cut up your oldest jeans for wicks and siphoned gasoline from the car. I took packing peanuts from boxes I keep in the closet.”

“Packing peanuts?”

“Natalka says the foam sticks to skin and burns into bone when you catch fire from Molotov cocktails.”

Excited, Kateryna spoke up.

“To kill Russians,” she said.

Andriy turned on his daughter.

“How old are you?”

“Almost eleven.”

Looking at Svitlana, Andriy struggled to hold his temper.

“You teach our daughter to make explosives to kill Russians?”

Svitlana flared with defiance.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”

Folding his hands as if in prayer, Andriy said, “Go to your room, Kateryna. Decide what to take if we must leave.”

“Fine,” Kateryna said. “I’ll see if any of your empty beer bottles rolled under my bed.”

Svitlana filled another green bottle with gasoline. She used a sharp potato paring knife to cut the white foam peanuts into tiny pieces which she shoved into the neck. She capped the top with a twisted blue strip of faded denim.

Shocked, Andriy stood in awe.

“Do you really know what you’re doing?”

“Defending my country,” Svitlana said.

Andriy felt alone for the first time since he and Svitlana married in the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv 12 years ago.

“I’m resisting war like you should be doing,” Svitlana said.

Andriy wanted only to surrender.

“You’re making deadly weapons with our baby girl,” he said.

“Show some courage,” Svitlana said.

Andriy’s voice broke.

“Do you know what you’re doing to Kateryna?”

“Preparing her to stand up for what she believes in.”

“Which is?”

“Freedom.”

“Is freedom won by making others suffer as much or more than we do?”

“You twist everything,” Svitlana said. “You sound like Putin.”

Squealing with excitement, Kateryna raced back into the room.

“The men outside my window blew me kisses. Oh, my God, they’re so cute. They have rifles.”

“They’re our heroes,” Svitlana said.

“They’d be better off at dance class,” Andriy said.

Svitlana burned with anger. Or was it patriotism? Or hatred? Or all three?

“You really don’t understand, do you, Andriy?”

Within three days the family separated. Andriy and Svitlana said a strained goodbye at the railroad station. Kateryna, never before having traveled by train, looked forward to the trip to Poland. Before they boarded Svitlana kissed her husband lightly on the cheek.

“Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the heroes,” she said.

“Call me when you arrive,” he said.

Fearful with foreboding doom, Andriy never expected to see his wife and daughter again. As he turned from the slow moving train packed with women and children, the automatic rifle hanging from his shoulder slipped. Grabbing the barrel, he worried the used Kalashnikov he picked up that morning at the library might accidentally go off. That’s all he needed, to finally agree to fight and get shot and killed by one of his neighbors who mistook him for an invader. In the eyes of many he was a saboteur hindering the struggle with a bad attitude.

Andriy hated guns, fighting, violence, even arguing. Chess, reading, writing poetry and cooking Chicken Kiev (even spelling the city the Russian way in his handwritten recipe book) appealed to the deepest reaches of his spirit. Bold gold patriotism sounded nice but the concept got complicated, even lost, when you asked people to explain what responsibilities came with wrapping yourself in the Ukrainian flag.

Did the Porsche owners, mostly bankers and financial brokers who fled the country under cover of darkness carrying suitcases loaded with cash, bear the same burden his wife and daughter hauled in their knapsacks packed with stale bread, hard cheese rinds and what was left of Svitlana’s blood pressure medication? Did Russian Mafia bosses encounter difficulty getting out of the country? Did mob enforcers wearing thick gold chains stick around to help save the nation or escape with their mistresses to stroll the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, New York, by next weekend?

Checking his watch, Andriy looked for the truck that would transport him to his post, a bridge where he would stand guard against the coming tanks. Out of cigarettes, he wondered where he could buy more. Or steal more. Looting crossed his mind for the first time in his life. If need be he’d steal cigarettes if other looters left any for him. A citizen soldier now, Andriy could do anything; take anything, loot, pillage, rape, kill, torture all in the name of upholding liberty. A disturbing sense of power stunned his brain.

So did a sudden urge to empty his bowels. Where could he go? What would he do if he failed to find a toilet? He imagined his bloated intestines pushing against his growling belly. How many others must feel the same as they smelled themselves ready to explode? What if he just weakened and let go? Would anybody notice or shame him if they did? Andriy’s nation had turned to shit. So embarrassed he wanted to cry, he wondered what Svitlana would say if she knew of his dilemma? Worse, what would Kateryna say?

A Russian armored car turning the corner jolted Andriy from his thoughtful misery. Before he could turn and run, the vehicle detonated. A lone Ukrainian soldier ran across the street holding a smoking shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon. One Russian survivor struggled to stand in what was left of his still sizzling uniform and stumbled forward, heading straight for Andriy who pointed his rifle at the man’s face. Old for a soldier on any side, with soft cheeks that once shined rosy in winter, the Russian Marine coughed blood and spoke in Ukrainian.

“Please,” he said.

Andriy thought of calling Svitlana on the cellphone in his pocket, asking to speak with his daughter and telling Kateryna he had captured an enemy prisoner but didn’t know what to do with him. He’d tell her that more than anything in the world he wanted to take ballet classes with her when she returned home and peace resumed. In his mind he heard Kateryna laugh knowing he must be kidding when she said, “You are so funny.”

All around Andriy people screamed, fired guns, fell in the street. A Molotov cocktail flew through the air from a doorway. Watching the green glass sail high beneath a burning wick, Andriy wondered if his daughter helped make that bomb.

How could she do such a terrible thing?

Kateryna wore a peace symbol T-shirt.

She loves books.

Katetyna brought joy to the world.

At that very moment she must be practicing ballet in Warsaw.