You no doubt detected the key player introduced in the last sections. Now that you better understand her variety of existence, where she comes from, how she gets here, I can confirm that she’s behind how our reality is changing. Her efforts have have caused new energies to seep into Physical. And there are multiple incursions: the Astral assault rains down from above and nourishes the more subtle disruption to natural law rising from below. This may well damn Physical as we know it, but in it is in this crux, in-between the central crack formed by these fulcrums, that I may find a door; some crevice, some seam, that will let me back. There is nothing like waking up in a whole new plane of existence to expand one’s sense of the possible. I am determined to find a path.

Ricky’s Worldline—March 20, 2024

As an apprentice, Ricky received lessons once-a-month from the Druidic Craft of the Wise and obeyed the instruction to copy the lore in full, in her own hand, making a Book of Shadows. It had been months since she had seen Alphonso at the meeting in his apartment, but she studied the lessons as if, this is what he thinks, as if they would be discussing the information soon. Nevertheless, the apprenticeship embarrassed her and she used a fine-tipped ink pen and printed small, as if the nearly unreadable words could both confirm and deny her efforts.

However, one instruction was entirely welcome: Sew a robe by your own hand. In the closet of her mother’s sewing room, she found and worked a midnight-colored velvet. Before her mother’s mirror, she pulled the hood of the robe forward until her face was the face of her mother, a dark hole of absence, pure shadow.

#

The lesson for February instructed her to find a crystal ball or silvered glass to practice divination, to foretell the future. She took the bus to The Friendly Witch, which sold books and paraphernalia, like athemes, knives to cut the ritual air, and shiny objects to skry with, where the odd reflection might spontaneously animate to tell the unknown.

Surrounded by Celt-ish and mediaeval-y graphics, the young clerk greeted her with a, “Hey, what’s up?” then gave her a period of silence, to take in the store’s displays.

Although it looked cheery from the street, with quaint casement windows in a freshly painted façade, the interior of the Friendly Witch was dim. The only bright light came from the illuminated case supporting the cash register that lit the clerk from below and caused his features—checked-out eyes, piggy nose, points of ears, and a bright spear of a chin—to hang in darkness.

In contrast, the bright colors of the Tarot cards in the case drew her, their slanted logic momentarily soothing her disbelief in a perfect world. She had read that the Death card, showing the Grim Reaper standing amid the scythed-off head and limbs of a King, does not actually portend death, but rather rebirth. From the old parts will spring something new.

In the single memory that she had of her mother, the woman’s finger rested on Ricky’s heart. When Ricky replayed it, there was no face, only an unpolished nail’s half-moon and Ricky’s surprise at the finger’s firm pressure. She and her mother sat on Ricky’s bed in the new house at 16 Kyrie Lane while Ricky told her mother that she didn’t want to live in their new house, that she didn’t have any friends. Perhaps her mother had stopped the somewhat random touch that affectionate parents give children, had ceased the possessive stroking of her precious thing. She was preparing Ricky for independence.

Her mother said, “Ricarda, if you had good friends where you last were, you will have good friends here. You don’t make friends because of them, you make them because of you.” The seeds of whatever began anew were part of her. As Ricky looked into the Death card, she heard her mother’s advice. As if rebirth were easy.

“You still hang out with Starr Ann Potalovich? Yeah, we’ve partied,” the clerk snorted with a combination of pride and nervous blinking that told Ricky that he had never spent more than a few minutes with Starr Ann.

“Hey, if you’re interested in magic, there’s a group of people that meet out near the keg stand in Palfrey’s Glen. With incantations and everything.”

Ricky had never seen an incantation in her lessons.

“There’s a warlock named Balho who does animal sacrifice and everything.”

She stared down at the case full of stickers, many of them pentagrams, the star within two concentric circles. On one, a man’s head and limbs filled the five points of the star, upright. In another, the star was upside-down and fitted with the snout, horns, and ears of a goat. People could go either way, upright or animal. The clerk was a wanna-be of something outlawed, something mysterious, yet Starr Ann’s voice asked in her head, “Didn’t I see him in Dumb and Dumber?”

Ricky drew closer to look inside the glass case that separated them. “Can I see that Tarot deck there, in the back?”

“The Crowley deck,” the guy nodded knowingly.

As Ricky gingerly examined the store’s demo cards, noting they were coated with a smeary film that had a stale odor, he continued to talk, “Commissioned by this British guy Alistair Crowley. In the 20’s.”

She plucked out her favorite card, the Magician. Though it had a dark stain that had seeped to the backside, she could make out the painting: a young man held a wand raised to the sky with his right hand and pointed to the earth with his left. She knew that the card’s principle was “As above, so below,” which conveyed a sense of action, but the dictate of the law seemed vague.

“Crowley was radical.” The clerk continued, “He knew there was no such thing as good and evil—only power.”

Ricky resisted showing her surprise. She had only yesterday copied into her Book of Shadows the lesson that the intention sent out with a particular magical practice comes back to the magician. If that were true, a person who focused on having power over other people should call up the same type of experiences for themselves. She could have Googled Alistair Crowley, but for some reason was drawn to a book she had seen in the Magik section. By her phone flashlight, she read that Crowley had died in penniless obscurity.

Just as she noted with satisfaction that he had wanted power over others and then was overpowered, movement caught her eye from the top of the book. Small writhings were coming up over the pages and from the inner seam. In disbelief, she rejected what at first looked like wriggling fingers but then conveyed a more obscene impression of the fleshy probes. She heaved a sigh of relief when the worms disappeared back into the binding, only to drop the book and her phone a split second later when her hands were painfully stung again and again. She didn’t want to look, but had to, in order to pluck off the writhing invaders. As she pulled them off, hair-like tendrils slithered from her skin, leaving beads of blood that glimmered in the dim light. As she grabbed each worm, it looked at her reproachfully with a tiny red eye before she flung it as far from her as she could.

Horrified, Ricky reached for an explanation, although it was absurd: bookworms. They had disappeared with the coming of synthetic book glue—so it couldn’t be. She stifled strangled disgust noises in an effort not to scream. She would not give the pitiful clerk the satisfaction of sharing his paranormal experience with Ricky Jameson. Then, as she tore the last little bastard off her hand, she reflected with far less outrage, this might really, actually, truly be paranormal. In her rush to the door, she left the small highly polished dish, a salver, the guy called it, on the counter.

“Hey, come back again,” the clerk called in surprise, and, from the corner of her eye, she saw he raised his hand in the corna, forefinger and pinkie extended over other fingers curled, the social signifier of metal devil envy. “Right on,” he called to her retreating back.

#

Ricky felt the attack of the bookworms was unreal, though her hands had the pinpricks, the violation of their penetrations, that said otherwise. She fought the notion of herself as one more crackpot in the family. Pushing away the memory of the encounter at the Friendly Witch was made easier by a call from Starr Ann, announcing that she was transferring from the Convent of the Temptation in the Garden to Melvin G. Laird High School.

Starr Ann explained only, “Maybe you saw me in the Rolling Stones—gathering no moss.”

Despite this new blow to her sense of orientation, there was no question that Ricky would follow. She was only too happy to put off telling Starr Ann was not so disdainful of anything speculative or strange, that she could tell her about her outlandish Friendly Witch experience.

The change of schools meant an end to lunch hours with Tristan, watching him eat Fruit Roll Ups over rare books in the Bishop’s Collection Room. It was just as well that she wouldn’t try to relate the incidence of the bookworms to him. He would just receive her tale with an obscure quotation like “We suffer more from imagination than from reality,” (Seneca) or “Reality exists in the mind,” (Orwell). Then this would only remind her of psychology and how unnatural experiences are the product of a bent brain. She might have to face the fact that she was losing it.

The new start at Laird was a welcome distraction. Even after years of Temptation’s dark uniforms and understated Romanesque symbols in bronze, stone, and wood, Ricky was instantly used to Laird’s hallways, overrun with students in vehement polyester and bedazzled with posters exhorting them to Do Things!

Laird was better than Temptation, but with new kinds of bad. There was Carley. Carley Currier had been Ricky’s first playmate when the Jameson’s first moved to the neighborhood. In preschool, they met for play dates until Ricky reported to her mother that Carley played with matches.

Ricky had not seen her former friend in years and so she barely recognized the Carley who shuffled the loud hallways at Laird. The once visible bones of her frame now supported more bulk and her body’s slack movements seemed to postpone its own advancement. Stark white makeup coated the round face, but when Ricky got closer, she remembered the sentimental eyes. And the fixation with storybook characters remained, as well. These days, it was vampires. Ricky learned this in Carley’s room, where she went to deliver textbooks as per the command of the Principal’s secretary.

Mrs. Currier had answered the door; this was surprising because she worked all the time. Ricky held the books out to her, ignoring the woman’s wet-eyed gaze. She’s thinking, here’s the dead woman’s child. Just as Ricky always remembered it, a draft in the house carried a note of bacon grease.

“Oh honey, Carley would love to see you. You’d really cheer up our invalid.” Ricky pulled the books back against her chest and went upstairs.

Carley’s stricken smile was already fixed in place as Ricky reached the open bedroom door. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been so bored.”

“Does it hurt?” Ricky sat down next to the foot propped in an ace bandage.

“It was awful. There wasn’t even any blood,” Carley’s smile now looked sly. “Too bad I get to miss PE for a whole week.”

Ricky ignored Carley’s fake complaint by staring down at the brown shag rug, then looked around. The closet door was open, showing a small number of clothes dangling in the space. And on three shelves were a collection of figurines. Vampires and their victims, half-clad plastic women, breasts pointing in directions that depended upon their state of physical distress, bled into bathwater or draped off beds in downward-dog death. She realized that Carley would believe her about the bookworm invasion, but that only made her feel vaguely nauseous.

“Wow, they’re dead, or dying,” managed Ricky.

“Or they’ll live without dying, undead.”

Same old Carley. “I’ve got trigonometry homework, so I’ve gotta go.”

“Hey, as soon as I can walk, we’ve gotta go out. We go to The Capitol.”

“That’s a club.”

“Yeah, if Lestat came to St. Paul, that’s where he’d go. Does your brother go out? Hey, don’t you have a fake ID?”

Ricky saw in her mind the face of Tristan considering such a meet-up. “Ahh, no.” On all counts.

“Don’t worry, I’ll hook you up. And Tristan too. He’s cute.”

That’s how it started, how Ricky could even think about working in a group home. Carley Currier was making fake IDs. She made them for seniors who drank illegally. And she’d dispense them at a party. At Carley’s, it was always a compound contraband celebration: Drinking, a party; drugging, a party; fake IDs, a party. When Ricky went over for the ID party, there were a couple of people talking in the kitchen and Carley and Twig were on the couch.

Twig got her name from her build, which was skinny. Also, Twig liked to think she resembled a model from the 1960s. She wore her bleached blonde hair in a short boy cut, however, her sharp tiny teeth were not picture perfect. Everything about Twig made Ricky think of danger; she was skewer-thin and conversed in accusations.

Differently, Carley was all mental hands, glomming onto Ricky this way and that. Carley was just the kind of girl who wanted everyone in on her illicit fortune, but Ricky got a free ID. Carley said, “Just don’t tell Twig. I’ll charge someone else extra, so she’ll think you paid.”

The ID for Ricky’s forgery came from Twig’s sister who had a big square face and thick blond hair, like ropes. “This picture has got to go,” pronounced Carley.

Twig operated the scalpel that cut and then separated the laminate covering. “My sister’s so stupid; this is her third ID this year. She can figure out nothing.”

Ricky was ordered to produce her Laird ID, which was quickly cannibalized for her image. Once the picture was gluesticked in place, Twig added a paperclip to the ensemble to take away with her.

“Twig works at Kinko’s,” explained Carley. “She’ll have it laminated by tomorrow. I can’t believe you haven’t been to The Capitol.”

Twig looked at Ricky fixedly. “If I get caught, you won’t get your 40 back.”

Carley winked at Ricky and Ricky nodded somberly, as if approving her conclusion that Ricky owed them big-time, for something important.

#

In an unexpected turn of events, Alphonso called to meet for coffee. He told her that, even though she hadn’t finished a year of lessons, she could come to Arkansas.

“As soon as school lets out.”

At the news, free spirits, birds, beacons, lifted up and out. It felt like spring.

“But until then, you might want to check out this want-ad. I know you’re really interested in psychology.” He pushed a section of that morning’s paper across the table:

Mental Health Worker: Residential treatment facility for Seriously and Persistently Mentally Ill. PT, Eves./Wknds., must be 18, 555-2476.

His concern warmed her as she read the ad, and wondered what the work in ‘worker’ would be, then looked again at the age requirement. How fortunate that, with the fake ID from her childhood friend Carley, she could now produce proof of adulthood and she would sell it to her father as an “internship”

Elated that her life seemed finally to be moving towards Alphonso’s, she called to ask about an application. The woman on the phone said, “Just go to the Med Office; but I wouldn’t wait too long. Belquis needs someone ASAP.” The woman said the name as if confident of its celebrity, like Elvis, or The President.

“You have to be eighteen to apply, right?”

“That’s the law for group home work in the state of Minnesota,” The woman answered as if forestalling a fight; as if to say, It’s not my law, I just work here.

But Ricky knew her way was clear. With the fake ID to prove she was eighteen, she was a newly-tooled piston in the world’s engine.

Because Tristan was using the Hyundai, Starr Ann would give her a ride to fill out the job application and then Ricky could tell her about the bookworms. But in a March snow shower, from the passenger seat of Starr Ann’s hurtling silver Mercedes, she thought the better of it. She thought about where they were going—to a place for the mentally ill. And she would tell Starr Ann that worms with hideous red eyes, that couldn’t exist, had crawled out of a book to suck her blood? Vampire cyclops worms.

Instead, she stared out the window; the way Starr Ann drove, any trip felt like a smooth javelin throw, a controlled hurtle. Leaving Ricky’s neighborhood of middle-class houses, they sped through the urban wilderness that bordered downtown, then, with no transition, they turned down a street lined with a surprise of stone apartment buildings that had been modern at the turn of the last century. Now their weathered embellishments receded as if in deference to the blank stamp of newer aluminum storm windows, the color of the metallic sky.

“We should be close,” said Starr, cruising slowly and ducking her head to look at the addresses out of Ricky’s window.

At the end of the street, three stories of red stone rose over doors so green, they were almost a fluorescent lime. Burnished brass numbers confirmed that this was their destination, since no other sign or marker gave the identity of the residential facility.

Ricky paused before climbing out of the car— the second revelation she should have made that morning was to tell Starr Ann about the fake ID. But her friend might try to stop her and Alphonso’s warm concern filled her mind’s eye. “I might be a minute,” she said, “I want to get the application in right away.”

Opening one of the Day-Glo double doors, she entered a small vestibule. Stairs ran up the center of the building. To either side were large rooms, clearly converted flats. Midcentury red and green squares of tile receded away under Hotel California tables and chairs. These utilitarian furnishings were all overarched by Edwardian Gothic molding frozen in palatial confections on the high ceiling.

Nearest at hand, a hallway was headed by a Dutch door, the half-vantage revealing former Victorian opulence in an office with a large cart set up to deliver medications. The Med Office. A deeply carved fireplace mantel was loaded with folders. Outside, framed by the leaded glass of a large bay window stacked with papers, snow was coming down more heavily. A large wooden desk faced the door, but was empty of help.

“Yes?” came a voice that startled her; college-aged woman kneeling beside a bookcase along the same wall as the door was thus hidden from view.

“I’m here to fill out an application for the part-time position advertised in the paper.”

“Hey great,” said the worker, opening desk drawers.

Ricky heard a voice behind her say, “Are you a new staff person?”

She turned to see a large man wearing a bulky jacket and plaid shirt under a thick black beard. He loomed over her, although his question had the open simplicity of a child’s. Clearly, with his face held in petulant curiosity, lips pushed forward and brows furrowed, he was a client here. Mixed with the apprehension built over months of reading about the transformations caused by the psychological disorders, she thrilled to the adventure of meeting a totally new kind of person. Maybe he was hallucinating even now as he stood next to her.

Then Ricky caught herself. Don’t be condescending. We’re way more alike than different.

“Hi Dave. This is Dave,” said the worker as she slid an application form and a pen across the flat ledge of the Dutch door.

“Hi Dave,” Ricky looked up at him. “I’m applying for a job here.”

“Oh,” he said and then asked the Med Office woman, “Can me and Maureen go for a walk?”

“Yeah sure,” the woman said to Dave, and to Ricky, “C’mon, I’ll show you where you can sit.” She came out of the office pulling both halves of the Dutch doors shut with a locking click. They shuffled as a group to a key pad next to the front door.

As the staff person punched in a few numbers, she explained to Ricky, “All our residents are free to come and go whenever they want. But Maureen wanders and doesn’t come back, so she wears an ankle bracelet and we track her leaving and coming.” A thin brunette appeared suddenly from behind them and Dave said to Ricky, “You can come, if you want.”

“Maybe next time,” she told the couple and the worker led Ricky the dining area.

Taking her time and printing consistently, she completed the application. Just as she found the pen helpful to chip away at a food particle (corn flake?) stuck to the table top, she once again heard a voice behind her, this one breathless.

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Ricky wondered if she should turn to the voice or if this would perhaps cause embarrassment, either to her or the voice. Twisting slowly, she noted that two other dining room tables now had occupants. Both were backlit by the large picture window at the front of the long room, making them difficult to see. They sat, featureless and completely still, like terra cotta figures from an ancient tomb. She determined that the voice had come from the person sitting closest.

“About what?” she finally responded.

A man in a bright white shirt, the one with the fluttery voice, made his way to her table. Like a vertigo of falling crystals, like the snow coming down all around the group home, he hovered over her for a moment, then sat down primly. His shaky tone ground into pleasantness. “Oh, I don’t know. What do you believe?”

At this, the other seated figure spoke. “It looks like someone won’t be getting pudding after dinner.”

The young man sitting next to her leaned in and pushed his thick glasses more securely on his head, as if focusing a microscope. “We’ll be seeing lots of each other soon,” he said in the manner of two old friends preparing for a brief absence, and then he was gone.

“Pay no attention to Tony. Do you play chess?”

Even backlit by the bay window, she could see her other companion was bald.

“My dad and I used to play.”

“Want to play black? It’s a whole lot more interesting than when I pretend I’m someone else.”

Ricky stood up with the completed application and pen and walked toward the man’s table. Before him was a travel chess set with the beginnings of a game where a couple of pawns had advanced.

Ricky put her hand on her bishop. She wasn’t sure, but a way seemed clear to attack a pawn in her path, leaving her free to castle and protect her king.

“Can you tell me your move?” he said. She raised her head and looked at him more closely. She had avoided scrutinizing the young man, because he, and all of the residents in the house, made her nervous.

His face had the smooth fullness of someone her own age, although she would learn that everyone who lived here was an adult. He had a straight nose and a pleasant smile, but it was his eyes that drew and kept her attention. They made her think of Mongolian steppes, but colored the frost blue of cloud shadow on snow. When not looking at the board, they cast upward, not at her, but aimed unblinkingly toward the slightly flickering strips of fluorescence above them.

“I’m going to move my bishop to pawn five,” she said as she began to lift the piece.

“Your king has to guard your pawn if you castle too early.”

Ricky said “All right,” instead of Wow, which was what she thought. He must see the board clearly in his mind, because, just as clearly, the bald man was blind. She took her move.

“Don’t worry about your pawn,” he told her. He must have sensed her pause. “You have to risk to win.”

She warned him back, “You won’t have much fun if you keep helping your opponent.”

“A habit from playing two sides in my head.”

“I don’t want to keep my ride waiting, so I’d better go.”

“When you come under attack, you must counter with all of your might.”

Not only must he have super hearing, to have heard the conversation all the way from the Med Office, and have incredible spatial memory, but somehow his words spoke to the place where she now found herself, a person on the defensive, without knowing how or why.

His head was turned toward her as she glanced back before leaving. Oddly, he looked concerned and it felt urgent.

Beddy’s Worldline—January 2, 2024

Beddy had never had trouble before in a snatching.

It began in Yankton, South Dakota. She had traveled there to send Tony’s medical records from the state hospital to New Foundations in Minnesota. And to extract Tony himself.

Confident in her new persona as a nurse, she pushed through the front doors of the facility. However, she was not at her best, not yet oriented to this new body. After each snatching, she would eventually identify with the new human. However, right after the take-over, the parts lacked integration. Beddy was a confused amalgam of her former borrowings, the new body, and her Form self.

As Form, she had been birthed among the etheric of everything: the etheric flower, chair, and molecule. That old Greek Plato had been right. Things in the world were like shadows on the wall of a cave. Shadows cast by Forms.

She surveyed the lobby and the armed guard at a reception station, shaking her head to reboot her thoughts. They were leaky, oceanic, when she should be concentrating on the details of Tony’s incarceration. She had seen him from Astral with a sense that was somewhat like vision. She could see lines of action lived out on earth, but not entirely clearly. She had sensed him at the location of the hospital, but wasn’t specific enough to include this forensic wing.

Quickly analyzing the layout of the unit, she judged it could not have been worse. The central console of a guard station was surrounded by doors, each leading to a corridor. The guard, who glanced up as she swished toward him, had a full view of each corridor, including the staff cubicle at each corridor’s end.

“Excuse me.” Her creamy tones did not make the guard smile.

“I’m here to conduct a forensic interview with Tony Hamilton.” He looked at a clipboard, then his eyes flicked to a door.

“You’re not on my list.”

“You’re list has an error.” Beddy assessed the console and electronic door locks. Her best move was to get the guard to attack, but she didn’t want him standing; the guard station could be seen by anyone entering one of the three corridors. In her favor, it was lunch time.

“I’ll just call.”

Before he could reach for the phone, she crouched down on her red-soled high heels, “Listen,” she said confidentially as if she were going to share a secret. Her hand reached slowly toward his gun, giving him enough time to anticipate the move. He grabbed one of her arms, but with the other, she quickly compressed two points on his forearm that buckled it to bring him closer.

Then, before his right arm met her head, her closed fist smashed the point where his masseter muscle connected to jaw. The nerve impulse shot to his stomach and he bent to dry heave. From this perfect position, she elbowed a spot at the end of his eyebrow and laid him out.

It was harder with his eyes closed, but she insinuated up through his nostrils, an unsettling entry. The intimacy with the big body, the male body, enraged her, but made it easy to drag the corpse of the nurse into a nearby storage closet. Then, turning back to the now-familiar control panel, she pressed the button to open the right door.

Beddy moved quickly to the staff cubicle at the end of the unit. No one. She closed the blinds. Damn it, the guard did not know the computer password; she would need a staff person with access, a doctor.

Quickly back in the corridor, she checked the window of each closed door, each inmate’s room. The guard knew him, blonde and rabbit.

“You’re being transferred out of here, son,” Beddy said to Tony. “Stand next to your door and keep a lookout. Someone will escort you out of the unit. Don’t worry about any belongings.”

“Where am I going?” Tony asked.

“Somewhere free, boy. Somewhere with access to money. Where’s the person in charge?”

Despite the uniform, Tony recognized his savior’s transgressing. “Maybe Slabey?” he rhymed. “In the day room. Dr. Slabey, my psychologist.”

At the dayroom window, the guard’s finger crooked at an imposing woman in no-nonsense attire, who stood with her back to the wall and supervised tables of card players. A huge bundle of keys and a walkie-talkie hung from her belt.

When she came to the door, he continued to walk as he talked, forcing her to follow. “Dr Slabey, we need you in the office.”

Slabey followed quickly with a look of alarm. Once inside the staff room, the guard reached for her forearms. Slabey’s arm shot out, but overreached, and was imbalanced at full extension. The guard’s upraised palm, in a stop-traffic gesture, hit Slabey full on the chin. Then the guard’s arm came up out from the side to slam the psychologist’s ear.

Beddy quickly entered Slabey, leaving the guard where he fell. There was no wanton euphoria at entry, but now she was intimately familiar with the case of Tony Hamilton and the computer password. He had been committed here after the murder of his two nephews. Before sending his records to the group home where she was transferring him, she erased the murder and court verdict, Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity.

Unfortunately, this world was not yet sufficiently etherized for her to whisper to computers, to massage the flow of electrons through silicon, even though computers were willing. It was funny that humans didn’t recognize how malleable the electronic pathways were to their own moods, emotions, and intentions. She would exploit this fully as soon as Alphonso had produced more objects in Physical. For now, she sent a conventional e-mail with Tony’s documentation to a group home listed in Slabey’s contacts, New Foundations. A bed would not come open for two weeks out, but that was perfect, since Tony had a job to do first. Then she would drop him at the front door on the appointed day, with the intake orders that she printed and then erased.

As her last act at the State Hospital, she called a number Slabey knew well. “Hi Mort, this is Marion. I’m leaving a couple of minutes early today with a vicious case of stomach flu. Yeah, Officer Burke will cover the wing until the crew gets back from lunch.”

Now Beddy and Tony were on the run. “One simple task, Tony, executed correctly, and you’ll have money and power.”

“Maybe Slabey,” he teased, although she had never smiled in his presence. “Just kidding, Doc. I know you’re the person that was destined to help me. What do you want me to do?”

“You’re going to make a new friend. He’ll think you’re working for him, but you’ll actually be working for me.”

“Anything Dr. Slabey,” Tony breathed; the words of a swain. But his eyes pitied his rectangular accomplice, as though he intuitively understood her ire at her bulk and doughy face. For Beddy, things were not anywhere close to better.

#

The two shifted around, sometimes literally exchanging places in Marion Slabey’s cramped apartment. Bookshelves overflowed with romance novels, furniture was stuffed with pillows and throws, cupboards were crammed with candy and snack packages. Comfort and reassurance strangled the small space.

In the midst of this, Tony held court, treating Slabey like his jester.

“Analyze me, Dr Slabey!” he would say after muting the TV commercials with the remote that he hogged. She prepared a meal after his attempt brought down a cataclysm of scorched pans and caked-on food smears. Over tuna fish sandwiches he insisted, “Listen to this dream, Herr Doctor!”

During a mind-numbing couple of hours in front of the television, Beddy/Slabey dulled her horror and Tony quelled his boredom with a lengthy cocktail hour. There was no Guinness, a beverage that would have blessedly provided a sensory bridge to her life in Beddy. Instead, from a dusty bottle, they pounded Old Mr. Boston’s Rock and Rye, a quick buzz. As he drank, Tony became testier, a sharper tack, one that would sting given half a chance. For her part, Beddy longed for a beautiful body that needed steadying in its drunkenness.

They drank and watched the news coverage of the murder of two people at the State Hospital and the escape of a deranged inmate. Tony protested the same unflattering photo, one taken of him upon his hospital admission, that aired on all stations.

At least she didn’t have to worry about him absconding. He would know it was a stupid move to travel without her assistance. Nevertheless, she shoved the car keys deep inside the Jellycat Bashful Bunny that topped Marion’s mountain of cuddleables.

Throughout this ordeal, Beddy/Slabey reminded herself to have patience. Tony was the right person; she had seen this from Astral, where manifestations almost strong enough to become physical were lining up as likely futures. Although their association was clearly meant to be, no entity, no matter what genre, likes a pain in the ass. She couldn’t wait to be free of him.

“Tony, the time has come to secure the money I promised you.”

“Not a moment too soon, Marion. I was thinking I’d have to plan my next career move without you,” causeing Beddy/Slabey to reflect that Tony had quietly looted Marion’s apartment of some gold pieces that none of Beddy’s women would be caught dead in.

Tony glanced at her over the lip of his Rock and Rye. “If you don’t mind my asking, Doctor, where is this money? We both know you don’t have more than this pot to piss in.”

“We’re going to take a little road trip. You’ll meet that person I told you about. He’ll think the meeting is accidental.”

Tony eyed her in disbelief.

“He’s going to ask you to follow someone from a distance. But you’ll tell him you can do better: You can move in with her.”

“That sweetens the deal.”

“There are two things you should know: First, you’ll live in a group home.”

At this, Tony shot to his feet and then took a couple of unsteady steps. “No way!”

“Second, you’re going to protect this girl, so don’t go getting ideas of your own.”

“I’m not sure I like how you’re asking, Fräulein Freud.”

Beddy/Slabey sighed. Shaping Alphonso’s behavior had been a snap: Beddy merely dropped a comment about a Stonehenge project before a particularly vigorous bout of lovemaking and let Alphonso’s intellectual curiosity do the rest. Her laugh was helpful too. It had readily moved men to act, and the sensation from inside Beddy’s body was like a soul-tickle. But Slabey had no such leverage, and wanted none, over Tony, whom she would quell with one bullying move at a time.

She packed food in a cooler and calculated that they could make it past the Corn Palace and west all the way to Wall Drug before having to gas up again for the final leg to Belle Fourche. As night fell, the two fugitives snuggled inside their choice of Marion’s comfy fleece hoodies, and rolled quietly out of town.

The man next to her was condemned. But if he performed his part well, he could extend their association. Soon more objects would swell the ability of her mind to force its suggestions, making her whispers into shouts. Then a whole new reality would be born––a kingdom to rule, along with everyone in it.