By Robert Long Foreman

Featured Art by Reagan Settle

I sat across the desk from the hospital administrator.

On the desk, reflected in her glasses, I could see a photo of her husband and kids.

Having the photo there must have kept her from feeling lonely at work. Or it fortified her in trying moments. Or both of those things.

Pens were on the desk, and a phone with many extensions.

The hospital administrator must have been in her fifties. She wore her hair short, but we’re not talking Terry Gross short. More like Meg Ryan in the nineties—only the administrator didn’t look like Meg Ryan. She didn’t look like anyone. She was wholly her own person, and I respected that.

“Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was surveying the photo of your children and husband. It’s reflected in your glasses.”

She blinked at me.

I said, “You told me on the phone you have a problem with your waiting rooms.”

“Yes,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “That’s correct.”

I took a breath and said, “It’s an inevitable part of life. Waiting, I mean. And it’s an inevitable part of being sick and seeking treatment, that you must wait to be cured. Even Christ, who could heal with a sweep of his hand, had to keep some lepers on hold while he saw to the first who came forward. They must have formed a line.”

She leaned forward and said, “I—”

“While you’re being treated at this hospital,” I continued, despite her, “others must wait for you to be cured, before they can enter the same room and be cured themselves. In order to accommodate those who sit in wait for their cure, a hospital must have rooms in which one waits. Waiting rooms.”

“Yes,” she said. “All of that is true.”

“Waiting rooms are inevitable,” I said. “They are our destiny.”

“Right,” she said. “If I could please get to my point, detective.”

“Of course,” I said, as if I hadn’t been preventing her from doing just that. “You have a waiting room problem. And I am the one to solve it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Or, no. The problem isn’t with our waiting rooms. Those are fine.”

“Is that so? They look dull as Purgatory to me.”

I smirked.

“That may be,” she said, not smiling, “but the problem I want you to solve for us takes place in our waiting rooms.”

“How many of them?”

“Five, so far.”

“You have,” I said, “a visitor to these rooms who gives you trouble.”

“That’s correct.”

“What makes him so sick?”

“What?”

“He must be pretty jacked up inside,” I said, “to have to wait for five whole procedures.”

“No, detective. You misunderstand. May I speak without interruption?

“The man I want you to investigate is not sick. Not as far as we know. We don’t believe he’s a patient at this hospital. He never checks in with our nurses, nor does he sign his name to anything.

“What he does is come to our waiting rooms with fruit. And he sits among the waiting patients and eats it as slowly as he can. As slowly as a human being could eat anything.”

She sat back in her chair, hands folded in her lap, and regarded me, letting me process what she had said.

“How slow are we talking?” I asked.

She took a breath.

“Think,” she said, “of the longest it’s ever taken you to eat an apple.”

“July 12, 1996. It lasted half an hour. A Fuji, if I recall correctly.”

“Excellent,” she said. “Think of the speed with which you consumed that pomme de l’arbre. How you savored every drop of juice that ran down your throat.

“Now slow it down to quarter-speed. No. One-eighth speed. Perhaps even slower.”

I said, “That’s impossible.”

“Oh, I assure you, Detective Monsterre, it is entirely too possible.”

I shook my head and corrected her mispronunciation of my name.

“It’s not Mon-stair,” I said. “It’s Mon-ster.”

“Monster?” she repeated. “As in, the things that scare children? Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m serious. But monsters do more than scare children. They’re the upstanding creatures who live on Sesame Street. Telly, for example, and Aloysius Snuffleupagus. Monsters can be nice. Do you have this fruit-eating man on film? Security footage?”

“No,” she said. “That’s half the problem. Our culprit is too smart to be caught on film. Too circumspect. He knows where the cameras are. He knows to avoid them. If we could catch him on tape, we wouldn’t have needed to call you.”

“How unfortunate for you,” I said, “that you had to contact the likes of me.”

“It’s nothing personal,” she said, “I assure you. We have an investigator of our own. Mister Barnes, the hospital detective. He doesn’t approve of our hiring you; I should warn you of that. He’s rather territorial. And with our budget stretched like it has been, it’s no small thing, to allocate resources the way I have, in order to pay your fee. And so I would appreciate it if you worked quickly.”

“I don’t like being rushed,” I said. “The job takes as long as it takes. I’ll get it done, but all work takes time. I assume you’ve identified eyewitnesses?”

“Our detective has interviewed eyewitnesses. He’ll get you the transcripts.”

“No need. I’ll conduct my own interviews.”

She sighed. “Mister Monsterre, please.”

“No, you please,” I snapped, standing. “You want this guy caught, you’ve got to let me do my job and do it right. I conduct my own interviews, I stage my own stakeouts.”

“Stakeouts?” She shook her head. “Just, whatever you do, Detective, don’t hurt him. Bring him to me. And leave the police out of it. We don’t need them nosing around.”

Once again I smiled. “Of course not,” I said.

But before I left, I stopped at the door and asked her, “How did you find me? Out of curiosity.”

“Oh,” she said. “You know, I had your card in my desk drawer.”

“You did.”

She nodded. “It’s a little strange. I don’t recall anyone giving it to me. But as soon as our detective informed me he was at a loss, I opened the drawer and there it was.

“Is something the matter?”

I shook my head. “No,” I lied. “Nothing’s wrong. Good day, madam. I’ll bring your culprit to you soon.”

Of course that wasn’t true. I knew too well what was going on. I wouldn’t have a culprit in tow when I returned.

That role in this drama was being played by a dangerous man. Someone who knew how not to get caught.

He was my nemesis. Awful Chris.

He was the true monster, here, the Caliban of our little stage play, or rather the Iago—or the Aaron, if we permit ourselves to reach as far back as Titus Andronicus. He is my greatest adversary, the rogue with whom I am locked in a prolonged battle, which is nothing less than a manifestation of the perpetual struggle between good and evil.

In the years since I began pursuing Awful Chris, he has ignited house fires, set traps, kidnapped an heiress, dosed unsuspecting innocents with poisons, and nearly brought on the collapse of two state legislatures. All of it was done in the name of the game he insists on playing with me, a battle of wits, the stakes of which could not be higher.

I did not doubt Awful Chris was responsible for this fruit situation. Only he would go to the trouble of hiring someone to eat fruit slowly in waiting rooms and planting my card where he knew it would be found by the right person.

I didn’t know what he was planning. But he must have been planning something.

All I could do for the time being was to enter the maze he had built for me.

I would have to go and speak with the hospital detective.

In order to reach his office, I had to walk across the hospital. It was an enormous building, as hospitals tend to be.

I took a circuitous route. I wanted to see the waiting rooms.

I passed eight of them, walking slowly in my brown suit, navy tie with red stripes, wingtip shoes, and steely gaze. The waiting rooms were full of people, most of them old. Some were plainly on the wealthier side; others must have been spending their last dollars on the treatments they were getting. I could see that in their posture, the clothes they wore, and the expressions on their faces.

It’s not hard to read people. It only takes practice.

I get a lot of practice.

The waiting rooms all had the same furniture: pale-green chairs, plastic coffee tables, old magazines, and pamphlets on HPV, prolapsed rectums, and throat cancer.

I saw no one eating fruit.

I saw several patients eating trail mix, one holding a Snickers bar, lost in thought, and others with pretzels, Cheez-Its, and peanuts. But no fruit.

At last, I found the office of the hospital detective.

I knocked.

“Come!” he shouted from behind the door.

I went in, and found an unhappy man inside.

His office was small, which must not have helped his mood. It had no windows, and for an office with one man inside it had an awful lot of file cabinets. I counted four.

The walls were painted off-white. Nothing hung from them. The desk was small, and the man behind it was mostly bald, about fifty years old, with a salt-and-pepper goatee. The worst kind of goatee.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, standing in the doorway.

“Come on in,” he said.

I came in, but there was nowhere to sit. The only chair that didn’t have his ass on it was piled high with files.

He said, “So you’re the guy they hired to do my job.”

I said, “It seems that way.”

He hadn’t stood, hadn’t reached out to shake my hand.

“I understand,” I said, “you have a list for me.”

“List?”

“Of witnesses. People you’ve interviewed?”

“Oh yeah. Them.”

He coughed into his hand. It was a wet cough. He picked a stack of papers up off his desk, and rubbed them with his germy hand, grinning at me.

He held the papers out, for me to take them.

Hospitals. What strange places they are.

And what odd things they do to the minds of those who spend their working hours in them. Here was this little man, in a little room, in a building filled to bursting with the sick and the dying and the just beginning to recover. It was a kingdom of germs.

But I was not a subject in his kingdom. Germs didn’t scare me.

I took the papers in my hands, and as he leered I began to leaf through them.

In order to make it easier to turn the pages, I licked my index finger.

After touching the page in my hand, I licked my finger again.

The germs that made him cough entered my mouth.

He knew it. I knew it.

And after peeling away the list of witnesses, I threw the remaining pages onto the floor.

“Hey!” he shouted, standing.

I stuck my thumb in my mouth and ran it down the side of my face like a knife.

“Look at you,” I said. “In this office. This cozy place. Your shelter from the storm.

“There’s a man on the loose that you don’t understand. He’s capable of things you couldn’t fathom, and eating fruit at incredibly reduced speeds is just the beginning.

“What is he planning? What comes next, after fruit?

“We don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing.

“But I could take one glance at you and know you’re not up to the task of finding out. My fellow detective, you are a disgrace.

“I bet you haven’t even looked into where this guy gets the produce he eats. And here you are, lounging with your transcripts.

“You make me sick. And I don’t mean literally.”

That did it.

He stood and rushed at me, as fast as he could, which wasn’t fast, because he was getting old and had to make his way past files he’d stacked on the floor.

When he was finally close enough, he bunched my tie in his fist and said, “You listen.”

I seized his wrist, twisted my body to one side, and tossed him onto the floor. In a second he lay on his back, gasping. I’d knocked the wind out of him.

I straightened my tie. He’d had to let go of it on his way down.

“All I want from you now,” I said, “is to stay the hell out of my way. I’ve got a job to do—the job you couldn’t do. Good day to you, sir.”

*

It wasn’t for another couple of hours that I felt a scratch in back of my throat. A raw sensation I had felt before.

I have had sore throats. I have had colds, flus, and pneumonia.

It was that detective, and his germs. They did this to me.

They had gotten inside me, and they were hard at work.

I had thought I was invincible.

Was this part of Awful Chris’s plan?

There was no telling. He could have infected the hospital detective, knowing how likely it was I would breathe his air, touch his transcripts, catch his virus.

Was it likely, that he’d had such foresight?

I didn’t know. I was willing to put nothing past Awful Chris.

I cleared my throat and knocked at the door to an apartment.

I’d driven over there in my beautiful car. A LeSabre.

The apartment was number 307, in building three, in a complex off of Highway 45. The complex had a view of a parking lot and the back of a grocery store, where trucks unloaded food.

The woman who came to the door was young, with blonde hair tied back and blue eyes gleaming. She had the only nose I’d seen in at least four weeks that I could describe as “retiring.” Skinny and tall, she was built like Keri Russell, from Felicity and The Americans.

A single tear ran down her face.

“Is everything all right?” I asked her.

She nodded. “I was watching something sad on TV.”

“Was it the series finale of Yatch?”

She looked stunned. “How did you know?”

I smiled. “Because I cried that same tear when I watched it last night. The way Randall just leaves like that? He doesn’t even say goodbye.”

“What is this about?” she asked, collecting her wits. “Who are you?”

I said, “I’m Martin Monsterre. Private detective.”

“Did my ex hire you?”

“The hospital hired me. Mercy West.”

“Is this about the fruit guy? I already talked to someone about this.”

“You did talk about it, ma’am, but I’m not their man, I’m a professional. I’m not a miserable slob that eats garbage and has mistaken himself for God’s gift to mysteries.” I cleared my throat. Phlegm. “May I come in?”

“Yes,” she said.

She moved aside. I went in.

The apartment was small, but it was neat and clean. No surprises inside: a couch, a TV, a kitchenette. She had a KitchenAid mixer, which would have told me she’d once had a wedding registry, if I hadn’t already known that from her mention of an “ex.”

She offered me coffee. I accepted. It was strong.

The witness said her name was Anna, which I knew already.

She sat across from me, on the couch, and I said, “Hospitals are strange, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” she said, with her own coffee. “How do you mean?”

I said, “Anything can happen at a hospital.

“Anything can happen anywhere.”

I sipped the coffee. “Is that true?” I said, more to myself than to her.

She looked at me and didn’t answer.

I had to focus.

I couldn’t let myself fall into the hole that question opened in the path before me.

“What took you to Mercy West that day?” I asked. “The day of the fruit thing?”

“I don’t think you can ask me that,” she said. “It’s a HIPAA violation.”

“All right,” I said. “Why don’t you just describe the incident, then?”

“Again?”

“Please, ma’am, I have to catch the man who did this to you. Tell me everything you remember.”

“Well, he had brown hair.”

“Excellent. Tell me what he did.”

“At first,” she said, “there was nothing remarkable about him.”

“Except for the brown hair.”

“Yeah, it was a regular situation. I was waiting in the waiting room. Playing a game on my phone.”

“Candy Crush?”

“Soda Power Candy Crush, yes. How did you know?”

“Ma’am, I’m a detective. What happened after this man withdrew the dildo with your face drawn on it?”

“What?”

“Shit. Fuck. Wrong mystery. Never mind.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have to do more than one mystery at a time. They overlap.”

“What?”

“Detective pay has stagnated for years. The cost of everything has gone up. I can’t handle just one thing at a time. I’m on, like, four cases right now.”

“Don’t you get confused?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course I do. I just did.” I shrugged. “But it’s like it is for everyone. No one does their job all that well anymore, because they have to do more than one job to make ends meet.”

“All right.”

“Let’s move on.”

“Yes,” she said. “He was a few feet from me, the distance between me and you. And I was playing that game on my phone when I heard this awful sound. Like licking. Or sucking.”

“Would you describe it as a kind of slorp-slorping?” I asked.

“Yes!” she said, pointing at me with enthusiasm. “That’s exactly it. A slorp-slorp. Like a baby suckling at a breast that’s been coated with edible Vaseline. So that it’s slipperier than it should be.”

I said, “What?”

She said, “Edible Vaseline. What’s wrong?”

“Is this a trick?”

“No.”

“You work for him.”

“The guy with the fruit?”

I looked in her eyes.

She had honest eyes. Or she was good at lying with eyes, I didn’t know which.

“Someone told you to talk about slippery breasts,” I said. “Who was it?”

“Detective,” she said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Let me explain,” I said, swallowing. It hurt to swallow. “Someone is behind all of this. Not the man who ate the fruit, but the one who put him up to it. I don’t know how, but he knew you would be there, in that waiting room, where he would eat in front of you. And he knew you would make that analogy. The breast analogy.

“We have a history, that villain and I. Six years ago, he was sneaking into the rooms of new mothers at night and smearing their breasts with edible Vaseline. When they nursed their babies in the morning, they found the little ones made more noise than usual. It was because of the Vaseline on their breasts. Grape-flavored. They had no clue how it got there, or what made it edible. The police were confounded, and I was, too—for a time.”

I felt a chill. Then I felt hot.

I loosened my tie.

“Are you all right?” Anna asked.

I nodded.

“You’re sure you don’t want to lie down?”

“I’m sure. I only have a few more questions.”

“About the breasts.”

“No. That’s a minor detail.”

“Minor detail? Surely, Detective Monsterre, you don’t mean that.”

She stood and walked toward me.

I said, “What’s going on?”

“Whatever do you mean?” she asked. “I’m only walking toward you.”

“But that look on your face. It’s the look of someone with—”

I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t speak.

And I knew why not.

I’d been slipped a sedative, by way of the coffee she’d served me. And I knew precisely what kind.

The drug she had dosed me with was called Lodium Jentax. It had recently been discovered in Peru by a slash-and-burn farmer who was also an adjunct professor of biochemistry. Lodium Jentax was a quick-acting sedative, one that worked particularly well on private contractors. Which I was, technically, as a detective who owned his own business. My tax problems are staggering.

I knew what drug it was because of the taste in my mouth. The telltale sign of Lodium Jentax is that it makes the inside of your face taste like beets.

Soon I was prostrate on the couch, looking up at the woman I was supposed to be questioning.

She stood over me and bent down.

I couldn’t move.

Chills ran up and down my spine, maybe from the drug, but maybe from the virus that was swiftly overtaking me.

Anna—if that was even her real name—said, “I’m sorry to do this. It wasn’t my idea. But they offered me money, and I needed money. It sounds like you know how that can be.”

I could hardly speak, but I managed to say, “What are you going to do?”

She shook her head. She said, “He told me to tell you he would see you back at Mercy West. Oh dear. That stuff is working. You really are a private contractor.”

My eyes closed. I couldn’t stop them.

I was gone.

*

I woke, sometime later, to the buzzing of my phone on the coffee table.

It was dark outside. Many hours had passed.

I could move again.

I rolled off the couch onto the floor. My face met beige carpet.

I was alone.

I coughed. Hard. As I’d slept my lungs had filled with mucus, and now it had to come out.

My nose was running. Time to drain.

This job! The things it puts my body through.

Why don’t I stop? Go back to film school?

I sat up and answered the phone. It was the hospital administrator.

“Detective,” she said, “I hope you’ve been making progress.”

“Yes,” I said hoarsely, “I have.”

“We have a situation.”

“Oh?”

“The fruit-eater. He was just here. Again.”

I sighed. I sniffed. “Of course he was,” I said.

“Have you been crying?” she asked.

“I have not. I’ll be right there. You’ve got a new witness?”

“Yes. I can’t hold her for long.”

I said, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I hung up and went to the bathroom, where I riffled through the medicine cabinet and found a half-finished bottle of Dayquil. It expired in a month. That was cutting it close. And of course it was possible that Awful Chris had poisoned the Dayquil, knowing I would need it—but after all this time I know Awful Chris. I know what he will do and what he will not do. I can feel my way through his mazes and sense where the traps are.

I drank what remained of the Dayquil, went back to my car, and drove once again to Mercy West.

I went straight to the administrator’s office, the quickest way, through the emergency room. I coughed into the crook of my arm as I hurried past open wounds and languid children who lay draped and wheezing across the arms of the mothers who rocked them.

I knocked at the administrator’s door. She called me in, and I went in.

Anna was there, across the desk from the administrator.

She had brown hair, now. She sat in the chair I had sat in before.

Her eyes were puffy. She’d been crying.

“You,” I said. “What are you doing here? When did you dye your hair?”

She said, “What?” She looked confused.

I turned to the administrator and said, “This is Anna. The witness I interviewed.”

“I’m not Anna,” said the crying woman. And indeed, the woman’s voice was somewhat deeper than Anna’s. She said, “I’m Anna’s twin sister. I’m the good twin.”

“The good twin?”

“Anna is my evil twin,” she said. “My name is Rhonda.”

I looked at the administrator in disbelief.

“Don’t dismiss this, detective,” she said. “It may sound to you like the dregs of a backward folklore, lost to time, but I assure you, evil twins are an unfortunately real phenomenon.”

I saw no reason to contradict her, to insist this was nonsense.

The things I am willing to agree to, in order to get paid, can be truly staggering.

But this was indeed Anna’s sister. That was plain. She looked like Anna, but I could see, now, it wasn’t her. Her forehead was slightly broader than Anna’s, her ears a little bigger. The differences between them were subtle. I missed them at first—but not for long. I am a detective, after all.

I sat in the vacant chair and coughed again into my arm. The Dayquil was working, but it could only do so much.

I said to Rhonda, “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

She frowned.

“There’s not much to tell you,” she said. “I was in the waiting room, playing Kandy Krush Klassic—the Ku Klux Klan edition of Candy Crush—when I heard a wet sound. A kind of slorp-slorping. And when I looked up, this man with brown hair was biting into a peach.”

“Hairy skin and all?”

She nodded. “And then I realized how slowly he was biting into the peach. I thought something must be wrong, at first.

“He was chomping so slowly. That’s what I realized, after—I don’t know—ten seconds? His jaw was moving, but it was moving at the speed of a snail’s jaw. When it eats a leaf.”

“Or a mushroom,” I said. “Portobello. Chanterelle. Snails love those. I’ve looked it up before.”

She said, “It was the slorping sound that was the worst part.

“It was like he was stuck, or—and I know this sounds crazy—like the peach was attacking him, trying to make its own way down his throat, and he was struggling to keep it out, to hold it in place with one hand and use his teeth to keep it clamped there, to stop it from choking him.

“Oh gosh. My gosh, it was awful!”

“It’s all right,” said the hospital administrator. “He’s gone, now. We’ll catch him.”

Rhonda shook her head. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just—he was drooling. And his saliva mixed with the peach juice. It ran down his chin and dripped on the floor.

“The slorping was the sound he made when he breathed hard. Like, he’d exhale, and tablespoons of juice and spit spilled out the sides of his mouth.”

“It sounds,” I said, “almost as if he were engaged in some metaphysical endeavor, in which he tried to become a fish by exhaling peach juice and saliva. The way a fish would if it were submerged in spit and juice.”

The administrator’s eyebrows were raised. Like a raised drawbridge, made of brows.

“What?” said Rhonda.

“All I’m saying,” I said, “is that it sounds like he was trying to become someone he isn’t. Something he isn’t. A whole other species, in fact.

“Don’t you see?” I looked around. “It’s the only plausible explanation.

“The administrator, here, said before that he wasn’t a sick man. But of course he is sick, only in a way no doctor can treat.

“I have no doubt, ma’am,” I continued, standing, “that miracles are performed at this facility every day. You have capable doctors, here, and nurses who I’m sure are great. But no doctor can make a man into a fish.” I sat again. “And so this man has taken matters into his own hands. He thinks that by eating produce as slowly as possible in a hospital setting, and slorping the juice everywhere when it collects in the pit of his mouth, he can metamorphose. Transform. Into the man-fish.”

Rhonda said, “That doesn’t make sense at all.”

“Oh, it doesn’t?” I said, standing again.

I walked to the administrator’s desk.

“Does it make as much sense,” I said, “as a hospital administrator whose phone is not plugged in?”

I picked up the phone, and sure enough, no cords came with it. It was a dead phone, completely disconnected.

“How does that revelation compare,” I asked, “to a family photo featuring a young Jessica Chastain and a young George Clooney, photoshopped so that it appears they’re sitting together with this woman before us, and a husband she doesn’t really have?”

I held up the framed photo I had seen reflected in the administrator’s glasses.

It took a trained eye like mine to spot it, but there were clear signs that the people in the image had been photoshopped together. When you looked close, the kids were plainly Chastain and Clooney as pre-famous children. I studied the lives of those two, at film school, before I dropped out.

“I don’t understand,” said Rhonda.

“Of course you don’t,” I said. “It’s all right, my dear, this has been an unfortunate charade, a show you have been unwillingly conscripted in, a ballet of intrigue and confusion orchestrated by none other than the notorious Awful Chris.” I turned to the administrator. “Am I not correct in this?”

She was speechless. She watched me with her mouth open.

“I thought at first,” I said, “this woman might be Awful Chris in a convincing disguise. But something else is going on here. Who are you, really, hospital administrator?”

I got my answer a moment later.

The administrator’s eyes collapsed, first one and then the other. A clear liquid leaked from them and ran down her face.

Her nose fell off. Her jaw fell open, unhinged.

Rhonda screamed.

The administrator’s body slumped forward and more of that liquid drained from her as she deflated and her life liquid spilled onto the desk. The papers there were ruined, but it didn’t matter. They were fake papers.

This wasn’t even really an office. It was a large supply closet, I realized, that Awful Chris had made to look like an office.

Of course, I thought. This was why he chose a hospital.

He must have stolen organs from cadavers in the morgue and spliced them together to make this administrator’s body. He’d filled the organs with blood and saline, and used a still-active brain that would go through the motions of propelling me on this quest of Chris’s design. She would last just long enough to keep me busy while he did something else, something far away from there, something I’d missed because I’d been preoccupied.

“It’s all right,” I said to Rhonda.

But when I looked up, she was gone.

The place was a mess.

I sneezed three times.

It was time to go home.

I would sit up in bed for a while with a bottle on the nightstand. A bottle of Nyquil, that is—and not the generic stuff. I’d spring for the real thing at Walgreen’s.

I’d smoke a cigarette.

I wondered, as I left the hospital, how much of what I’d seen that day had been real.

The detective was real, I thought. His germs were real, as was the drug Anna had given me.

I was real. I felt certain of that.

The man eating the fruit had no doubt been real. As I’d suspected all along, it must have been Awful Chris in a brown wig. He would not have entrusted his glorious disruption to an accomplice. He would have eaten the fruit slowly himself.

I went back out through the emergency room.

Someone had been shot. He wailed and screamed. He pleaded for a doctor.

But I took one look at him and knew he had no insurance.

There was nothing I could do to help him with that. I don’t have insurance, either.

On the way home, it started to rain.

---

Robert Long Foreman‘s most recent books are WEIRD PIG and I AM HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS. Read more of his work at http://www.robertlongforeman.com.