Good News at a Bad Time

It's been nothing but good news all week.

First, and by far the most important, the Supreme Court threw out Texas's omnibus "make abortion completely inaccessible for most people who live outside the big cities and don't have lots and lots of money" law in a 5-3 split that marked the most significant court decision on abortion since--oh, well, since Roe v. Wade, probably.  Cutting through a mass of legal gobbledygook, the Court stated very clearly that states can't just go around slapping new regulations on abortion clinics to drive them out of business.  Which prompted the part-time Texas governor and full-time asshole Greg Abbott to accidentally admit that's what he was trying to do all along.  Now all we need is for somebody to admit that what anti-abortion activists are really all about is trying to punish women for having sex and we'll start having this discussion in an atmosphere of intellectual honesty.  Which would be refreshing.

Next, a much less significant Court here in Texas allowed the reinstatement of a lawsuit it had pitched out, and in a shocking twist, the Court even admitted that a "clerical error" might have led to the dismissal of the lawsuit in the first place.  It's a small thing, but I'll take it.  It beats the hell out of having to refile the petition, repay the $300-odd fee, re-serve all the defendants (presuming I can even find them again), and all the other stuff we'd need to do if we hadn't been able to get it reinstated.  So kudos to my boss, for good arguing at the hearing.  And me, for writing a good motion.  Rah.

And finally:  I have a new project.  I haven't the foggiest idea what it is, though I'm kicking around a few things, but I have a new project.  I have mentioned Rhett from Jinks, Oklahoma before, but only in passing and not as "the really cool guy I met at the Pen to Press Writer's Conference in 2010 and we're still friends all these years later."  So Rhett is this really cool guy--right.  And a couple of days ago I finally got up the nerve to ask him if he wanted us to write something together.  And he said yes.  Whoo hoo!!  So again, we don't know what we're going to do yet, but we're going to do something.  I'm leaning toward a suspense thriller with lots of blood, chapter cliffhangers, shocking "Game of Thrones" style deaths and the occasional gallows humor.  If you knew Rhett (and you should, because again, he's really cool) you'd probably think that's his kind of thing, too.

So anyway, it's all been good news.  And me?

Well...

Let's see here.  On Monday I became elated that a Big Country song was on the radio and a few minutes later started sobbing because it reminded me of my ex, who died recently, and now I'll never know why blah blah blah etc. etc.

On Tuesday, I caught myself driving 80 mph on the freeway.

On Wednesday, I had a complete meltdown at the gym and cried for ten minutes because I was so upset about the way our society treats fish.

And on Thursday, I called my doctor and said, "Something jist ain't right here."

Yep. After three or four years of being stable and pretty much asymptomatic, I'm suddenly spiking bipolar symptoms all over the place again for no apparent reason.  It's been kind of like having a storm of little earthquakes.  Either that's the fault line settling into a new and more stable position, or it's the buildup to the Big One and who the hell knows which?  So it's been pretty scary. I mean, I like being asymptomatic.  It's almost like being Normal.

However, This Does Happen. Things change, people change, haircuts change, body chemistry changes and sometimes doses of meds that have worked for a long time don't work anymore.  My doc upped my dose of something or other to see if that would help.  (Again, psychiatry is a lot like alchemy; you try a little bit of this and a little bit of that, try to find a good drug cocktail that treats the most obvious symptoms while not killing you with side effects, and if you happen to turn lead into gold at the same time, good on ya.)  So far, I have an upset stomach and I'm more scatterbrained than usual.  Oh, and I had a migraine yesterday, but that could be coincidental.  So I'm typing with crossed fingers because seriously, that's not bad at all.

And so July arrives, not with a bang but a whimper.  July, of course, is Swim for Distance Month for my swim team.  We try to swim as far as possible in the alloted 31 days, and the winner gets some cheesy prize, but I'm never going to come anywhere close to winning because I just don't swim that fast.  I am, however, shooting for 23 miles, which will be tough but doable.  (Think a mile a day for 23 days out of 31.  Again, should be doable.)

Also, I am once again inviting people to pledge me by the mile, the meter, or just generally for the 23 miles, or however far I get.  If you want to toss in a dollar a mile, or 50 cents a kilometer, or whatever you're comfortable with, that would be great.  I'll post regular updates here and all money raised (which is usually not a lot; I don't have many rich friends) will go to Heifer International, which is a nonprofit that helps people in poverty by giving them animals to raise. (Donations are tax deductible.) It's hard to imagine if you live in the United States or anywhere else in the 1st World, but an animal can make a huge difference to a family living in poverty.  A goat, for example, will give milk, which both helps with nutrition and can also be made into cheese and sold.  Also, a goat can get together with another goat and make baby goats, which can then be sold to other families and help them, too. In fact, a pair of goats can benefit a whole village. So Heifer's pretty neat.  I'd love to raise enough money to buy a water buffalo ($250.00).  You know, swimming, water buffalo--sort of follows, doesn't it?

Last thing:  I finally saw an announcement about that 5000 meter race I was going to enter.  It will be in mid-September. Actual date to follow shortly.

More About This Lutheran to Buddhist Thing. Part 1.

You may be surprised to hear this, but most people don't wake up one morning, say, "Hey, I'm the wrong religion," and go out and join another one.  If you're going from one kind of Protestant church to another -- Methodist to Presbyterian, let us say -- it might be that easy, but usually there's a little more to it than that. For yours truly, anyway, there was a long period of being uncomfortable standing under that particular banner, followed by an even longer period of wandering around wondering which banner would be better.  And finally deciding that none of them were perfect, but that the people most like me, tended to be Buddhists.  Coincidence? Nah.

I grew up in the Lutheran Church, which for Protestant Christianity generally, isn't a bad way to grow up at all.  Lutherans are pretty tolerant of people's differences (they're Scandinavian, natch) and don't get into a lot of discussions about literal translations of the Bible.  One Bible study I went to, we talked about space aliens for 45 minutes.  There were plenty of things about church I didn't like -- flat-out waste of a decent morning to sleep late, in my humble opinion, among other things -- but the philosophy wasn't the problem.  The problem was that I just couldn't swallow it all.  Jesus showed up 2000 years ago to take on the sin of the world and save everybody? Okay, that was cool.  Everybody since then is saved by the grace of God?  Not a problem. Be nice to people, help the poor, advocate for justice for the downtrodden?  Uh, isn't that what a Christian is supposed to do? But then we got to this business about none come to the Father but through me, and that was the piece of pot roast that just wouldn't go down.  

I mean, Jesus was cool.  Don't get me wrong.  I kinda like the guy.  But whether Jesus actually said it, or St. Paul (who never knew Jesus in the first place) just said that he said it, that whole "only this elite group of people, whoever they are, will make it into heaven" was a complete contradiction with the whole "God's grace" concept (see above). Look, either we're saved by the grace of God or we're not, and if we are, that applies to EVERYBODY.  Jew, Muslim, Hindu, guy on the other side of the planet who's lived in a rain forest all his life and has never met a missionary. No exceptions.  I mean, He's God, right?  He's either all-powerful and can save everybody, or He's nothing and doesn't exist. And if He's not gonna save everybody because of some arbitrary designation that human beings made up, then who needs Him? 

Frankly, the only reason I hung around with the Lutherans as long as I did was that the particular gang I hung with -- First Lutheran Church in San Diego, California--were such brilliant examples of the genre.  I mean they served meals to the homeless, had a doctor come in and treat the poor for free, an acupuncturist to help out folks who were in pain, a lawyer to help homeless vets get the benefits they were entitled to--oh, and they had this church over here, too, and if you wanted to come by on a Sunday, you'd hear some pretty good music and maybe learn something.  The church was almost beside the point; the main reason it existed was to cobble all these people together right in the middle of downtown San Diego, where, let's face it, they were desperately needed.

But there were cracks in the foundation.  Not at First Lutheran but in the Lutheran Church generally.  Gay people had always been welcome, and First Lutheran was a "reconciled in Christ" congregation, which meant they were super welcome, but there was a big kerfuffle in synod politics over whether gay people could be pastors (which was not unlike an earlier kerfuffle about whether women could be pastors.)  The uneasy compromise they came up with when I was still hanging around was that gay people could be pastors as long as they were celibate.  (Which was not unlike the earlier decision that women could be pastors if there weren't any male pastors available.)  Ironically, around this time the Fred Phelps group came and protested First Lutheran, calling us "fag lovers" for not chasing away gay people.  You're nobody until you've pissed off Fred Phelps, long may he rot.

And there was some other stuff. The big things were the God's grace thing and the gay pastors thing.  That was what finally suggested to me that I find another gang to hang around with.  But try extricating yourself from a church when you're one of the church ladies with the big breasts and the clipboard. (I admit it.) I mean I sang in the choir, I was on this committee and that committee, I was In Charge Of Stuff.  I had to move to Texas to finally get out of there.  Even if you know how to make paper flowers, they're probably not gonna insist you attend their church if you live 2,000 miles away.  

I didn't go directly from Lutheran to Buddhist, do not pass go or collect $200, though.  I tried being a pagan first.  Why not; all inclusive religion, no membership requirements (since they made it all up as they went along), invite any god you want to hang with you and oh, yeah, cast spells and stuff. Trouble with paganism is, though, that most of the people who practice it are pretty warped.  I expect they were that way before they started practicing, but still.  Besides, it's hard work.  There's stuff to read, things to memorize.  Homework.  Calculations.  Moon phases.  

Buddhism, on the other hand?  Do nothing.  Just sit there.  I could handle that.

I'm Ba--ack...

I'm blaming everything on the fact that I've had bronchitis for a week.  Even all the stuff that didn't happen two weeks before I caught bronchitis.  Seriously, though, I have been very sick, just lying in bed and sleeping and not doing much trying to get this thing to go away. I've been to the doc three times.  Antibiotics, steroid shots, breathing treatments, oh my.  One night I was wheezing so much that Joan wanted to take me to the emergency room.  I haven't been in the pool for eight days and my chlorine content is dangerously low.

And there was all that other stuff, the starting the new job, the getting Obamacare, the sister coming to visit soon, the cat's little health crisis (well, it's not that much of a crisis, just that he keeps losing weight and we don't know why). And then came the hot dry winds from the west of Texas, which are enough like the Santa Anas in California that they threw me into the same funk. And thus begat the spring cold, which became the spring bronchitis.  The last time I was this sick, it was 2006 and I had pneumonia. Missed two weeks of work (!).  Luckily I worked for the Feds at the time, and they have pretty strict rules about firing people that seem not to apply to the rest o' the human race.  Not so now, and it's just that, you know, it's kinda embarrassing when you're in your third week of a new job and you have to call in sick two days.  My first job out of college, I ended up in the hospital (!) on my third day of work, with abscessed tonsils (don't ask, it was gross).  Missed two weeks there, too.  But I kept the job. Stayed there for four years, in fact. So I've been lucky, I guess.

I've also been lucky in that the world's as fucked up as ever, so it's not like I lack for source material here.  Now we've managed to lose an entire airliner. Yes, I know the Navy sometimes loses aircraft carriers, but that's usually just on paper.  Although, considering how big the world is and how small airplanes are, it's really kind of odd that this doesn't happen all the time.  Flying's pretty safe, you guys.  Speaking as a kid who rode around in a four-seater Piper Apache with Captain Dad at the wheel (yes, once in a while he let me drive), in which everything that could have gone wrong did and yet I'm still here, big airliners are really safe.  What's not so safe are cargo ships.  Did you know, that for every WEEK that goes by on this planet, we lose two cargo ships?  Two ships. A week.  Not the local bulk cruisers mind you, I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now.  That's over 25,000 tons of freight, on average, just gone.  To say nothing of the crews, which I guess are considered expendable because most of them are from that other part of the world that we don't care much about and anyway, their skin isn't white.  But seriously. Two ships. A week.  If that were two airliners a week, do you think we'd be paying attention?

In other news, despite a bunch of State legislators jumping all over it and the Right To Life getting involved, Justina Pelletier is still in State custody in Massachusetts.  She's been very sick, has been to the ER twice in the last two weeks, and one commenter wondered if the State wasn't just waiting for her to die, since if she's still in custody then, the State can order no autopsy and say, "Oh, well, she died of pneumonia, too bad."  It's a grim but possible theory. A decision was expected last Monday.  Then Friday. Now Tuesday.  Boy, if I was waiting to hear if I got to go home with my parents I'd sure want the Judge to keep not issuing a ruling.  (Recap: She's 15. She's been in State custody for fourteen months. She's seen her parents less than once a week, hasn't seen her sisters or friends at all and spent most of that time on a locked psych ward with no cell phone, no Internet, no TV. So she couldn't communicate anything that was happening to her?  Or for her supposed personal safety?  Anyway, it all started when her parents disagreed with her doctors.)

Ironically, I think there are going to be changes in the law coming out of this case.  I'd like one of them to be that parents have the absolute right to choose medical care for their children absent obvious, malicious harm, that second opinions should be legally required if they're asked for, and that every hospital has to convene its ethics committee (they all have them, and you can ask for one) any time something like this happens, before anybody can call the authorities or make any final decisions about treatment. What's even more ironic is that while all these resources are being poured into this one case, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of children in Massachusetts who legitimately need to be separated from their abusive families as soon as possible.  But, as usual, there aren't enough beds in foster care, the evidence is sketchy, the social workers are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position and foster care isn't necessarily going to be any better, considering these statistics. Kids in foster care are almost always appointed a guardian by the Court, but either none of them are doing their jobs or the civil rights of their clients are simply not a priority.  I promise you, if you tried to put an adult in a psych ward for over a year, insurance would pull out, there'd be Federal lawsuits and Glenn Beck would even raise his voice.  Oh, wait, he did.  Never mind.

People, be nice to each other. It's been a rough week.  Signing off.

Somebody Find Toto

Well, ya cain't say I didn't warn ya.  It was on this spot right here, only a few short months ago, that I told you what would be happening after pregnant women were banned from all the big cities.  Being caught in a metropolis with a bun in the oven will lead to an immediate charge of felonious breathing, as I think Margaret Atwood would call it.  Or reckless endangerment through inhalation of toxic gases.  Imagine, having the nerve, the unremitting gall to walk through New York or Boston or San Francisco, while pregnant, and knowingly inhale air known to be toxic to fetuses.  No different than Utah's skiing-while-pregnant ban or Florida's preborn human sun exposure law.  Nope.  We're having no more of these scandals.  I'm sorry, but that's it.  We're just gonna send them all to Kansas.

Why?  Because pregnant women are irresponsible and only take their own selfish feelings and demands for liberty into consideration.  Because in spite of all the scientific evidence that says women only exist as containers for preborn babies, there's always one or two that have to hop up and down and squawk about their "personhood" and their "rights."  Because Kansas is the only place that's safe.  Sorry, everybody in Wichita and Topeka and Olathe, but you're going to have company.  A lot of it.  For the  next nine months.

Think of it.  Millions of women packed onto Greyhound buses without a nay-say or maybe as soon as that little stick turns blue.  Shipped from around the country to the safest state in the Union (unless there's a tornado).  No skiing, no surfing, no sunbathing, no sex or drugs or alcohol.  (Well, there is that little crystal meth problem, but we'll get rid of that; we'll just jack up the sentences for possession and manufacturing and everybody'll be scared and, you know, just stop making and selling the stuff.) Nine months of perfect safety for the fetuses and their containers and then all the babies will be born healthy!  And that's what we want, isn't it?

Ah, perhaps you think I exaggerate. Or perhaps you think I'm off my proverbial rocker.  Well, you could be right about that second thing, but I'm afraid I am not exaggerating.  Take a look at this lawsuit, recently filed in Federal Court by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (and ponder, for a moment, why we even need such an advocacy.  Get back to me on that, will you?) Go down to the first orange link on the page.  Then read that sucker.  Yes, I know it's fifty-odd pages long. Read it anyway.  If you're anything like me, you won't be able to put it down.

Brief recap of the facts:  Alicia Beltran, a woman and, by definition, a human being, sought prenatal care at a local clinic in Milwaukee.  She confidentially told the doctor that she had been treated for prescription drug abuse and had been taking Suboxone, a pain medication.  She'd stopped taking it because she found out she was pregnant.  A few days later, five policemen came to her house and arrested her.  She was handcuffed, shackled and taken to a court hearing that she knew nothing about. An attorney had been appointed to represent the interests of her 14-week-old fetus.  (I am not making this up.  It's all in the lawsuit.  Go back and read it again.)  There was, however, no attorney appointed to represent Alicia Beltran, the living, breathing, already born woman.  With no testimony from any medical experts whatsoever and with Ms. Beltran not allowed to speak, the judge ordered her involuntarily committed to an inpatient drug treatment program two hours away from her family.  She has been a prisoner there since July 13, 2013.

Now, let's consider this for a second.

It is not illegal to take a prescription drug.

It is not illegal to refuse medical treatment.

It is not illegal to seek another medical opinion.

It is illegal for a doctor to release information about a patient without that patient's consent to a third party.  The law that governs that kind of conduct is called HIPPA.  It is also highly unethical for a doctor to release information given to him or her under the doctor-patient privilege, which is what happened here.

It is illegal to use intimidation or threats under color of authority, such as sending a social worker to someone's house and threatening that someone with losing custody of her children, to get that person to do something that you want. It was illegal for the doctor to send the social worker out there and it was illegal of the social worker to go.

It is very very illegal to kidnap a woman from her house, haul her away in chains, and lock her up someplace.  Yet somehow, Alicia Beltran needs a Federal lawsuit to get her out of a situation that never should have happened in the first place.

I can hear some of you thinking.  (Psychic powers.  I has 'em.)  And what I can hear some of you thinking is along the lines of "But what if she relapses and goes back on the drugs?  That would be bad for her baby, so it's better if she stays locked up until she gives birth."

Really?

Really?

Okay. Let's try this.  Somebody grabs you off the street, shackles you, throws you into a car, drives you to what's obviously a prison and surrounds you with police officers.  After several hours you finally get into what looks like a courtroom and there's a judge and you think, "Oh thank God, now we can clear up this mix-up," because obviously there's been one, right?  And then the judge winks at the guys who kidnapped you and says, "It's okay, boys.  She's pregnant."

Guess what.  Illegal behavior is illegal behavior whether the victim is pregnant or not.  Kidnapping is illegal,  Being addicted to a substance is not illegal.  Trying to quit the addictive substance on your own, without some nice rehab counselor holding your hand every step of the way, is not illegal.

No one ever offered any evidence that Alicia Beltran was using drugs.  No one tested her for drug use.  No one, as far as I can tell, even bothered to ask her, "Hey.  Pop any Suboxone today?"  Even if they had, though, that wouldn't justify anything that happened.  Again, being a drug addict is not illegal.

In fact, the law treats pregnant people and nonpregnant people almost exactly the same way.  There are a few exceptions for pregnant people who are under 18, but not many.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to drink.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to go skiing.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to go skydiving, go Rocky Mountain climbing, go 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu.  And it is illegal for a pregnant woman to do drugs, only insofar as it's illegal for anyone else to use drugs.

Believe me, if we could outlaw stupid behavior, we'd need enough prisons to fill the entire state of Texas.

It burns me up that more news agencies aren't following this story.  Why CNN and NBC aren't pounding on the doors of Casa Clare, demanding to speak to Alicia Beltran.  Why isn'lt Amnesty International protesting outside on the sidewalk? Where's the ACLU, when you really need them? Why aren't sixteen helicopters circling that rehab facility 24/7, demanding to know what the hell is going on? Because the last time I Googled it - 30 seconds ago - I found one story on Reuters and it was under a headline about Democrats and the shutdown.

Well, I intend to make some noise.  Do what I can to get some attention.  Send this blog post to people I know who will give a damn and might even write about it.  I may be a Buddhist with a Nook at a table at Afrah, but by God, you don't want to piss me off. I type mean when I'm mad.
 

Jenz Last NaNo Post

Yep, this is it, kids. It cuts off in a really awkward place, but this is as far as I got before the trial started. It's over now, so hopefully I can get back to it, but for the time being I gotta get out as many query letters as possible before all the NaNo folks do. Yes, I'm mercenary that way. But hey, there's only about 160 literary agents in the U.S. (that I know of) what represent My Kind of Material. I've bugged 15 or so of them, so only 145 to go. Then on to the UK and Canada, I guess. Anyway, I hope you've been enjoying this weird little trip to La La Land. I know I have.


Everybody knows about the Stemmons witches, but since you’re not everybody and you might not know about the Stemmons witches, here’s the deal. They aren’t really witches, for one thing. They’re “Three Hooded Figures,” by some Mexican sculpture artist or other, and for years they’ve sat in front of the Market Center building on the I-35E Freeway, affectionately known as the Stemmons Freeway, the Freeway of Death, Land of the Speeding Motorcycles and half a dozen other less friendly monikers. They’re–well, they look like three hooded figures. They don’t even really have faces, which was what took me so aback when the elevator doors opened. They’re just kind of rough carvings into bouldery shapes of rock. I mean, this is the sort of art that when I see it I want to grab the artist by the lapels and yell something nice like, “EARN your frick’n hundred thousand dollar city contract, sculpture boy!” But, on the other hand, there’s truth in advertising. They’re supposed to be three hooded figures. They sure as hell are.

They’re also somewhat of a local legend. An urban legend or whatever the hell, which is what you believe in when you don’t get dragged into the middle of some crazy multidimensional adventure involving the gods of Asgard, a giant black hole, the end of all reality and, oh yeah, a guy named Loki. The legend is that if you come to see the Stemmons witches at midnight, preferably under the light of a full moon, then they come to life and start moving around. But only if they don’t know anybody’s watching. Apparently that’s important. This legend got started some time in the 1970s, when any number of illicit substances that could make you think that inanimate objects are moving around were in high circulation among local college students (who seem, for some reason, to start most of these legends). I heard it when I was a student at TCU in the early Eighties, though, by which time the consumption of illicit substances had moved up a notch and involved stuff that scholarship kids like me could not afford. I did, however, have occasion to drive over to Dallas after six on a Thursday to see if we could stay up until midnight and watch the Stemmons witches to see if they came to life.

What happened instead was that security chased us off the property and threatened us with arrest if we ever came back. Which, I gather, was starting to happen all the time, so the powers that be finally moved the Stemmons witches from the front of the Market Center building and put them in the courtyard of the World Trade Center, not the seven-towered masterpiece in New York City that shouted “We Are The Commercial And Cultural Center Of The Entire Civilized World And By God Don’t You Ever Forget It” but a weird little two-story job that was built around this big magnificent courtyard. I think the idea was to have lots of foreign embassies rent office space in there for purposes of, I guess, world trade. What happened
instead was the bottom dropped out of the economy the year after it was finished (but the year before President DiCaprio was elected) and the whole area never quite recovered to the high-end rents it was designed to expect. The World Trade Center was primarily leased by massage therapists, a court reporting school, and the Salvadoran Consulate which, I suppose, couldn’t find space up the street on Prudential Avenue. And through it all the Stemmons Witches stood in the courtyard, solemnly being hooded and standing around not coming to life except at midnight under a full moon when nobody was looking.

Well, they were sure as hell moving now. The one in front grabbed me by the shirt front and pulled me out of the elevator. I didn’t even know they had arms under those hoods. I was a few feet off the ground before Cheryl could start screaming and by the time she did, the other two Witches were picking her up and shaking her. The first one, which had me, said something to the other two that sounded like stones being ground together and they dropped her. Then they all converged on me, just as security showed up (a little late to save me from being eaten by statuary) and people around the lobby finally figured out something weird was going on and ran
this way and that.

Then Loki, who I’d almost forgotten about in the confusion, winked into existence next to the Stemmons witches. He yelled something in Old Norse that sounded like a piano being tossed downstairs while fighting off a pack of rabid wolves and the statues froze again. Well, the three Witches froze, anyway. The ones outside, who were watching this through the window with fascination, didn’t seem to be affected at all.

“What the hell was that?” I demanded, picking myself up from the ground.

"Help,” Cheryl added from some distance above me. The Hooded Figure that grabbed her had frozen with its arms–I guess they were sort of arms–up in the air. She was suspended from the arms at around armpit level.

Loki reached up and yanked on one of her legs while looking up her skirt. She came loose and landed on top of him, which if you ask me was what he had in mind all along. In any case, he ended up with his head up her skirt and she ended up–never mind. Let’s just say I reached down and pulled her to her feet as fast as possible.

“Damn,” said Loki from the floor.

“Thanks,” said Cheryl, who had completely missed Loki’s attempts to grab her crotch.

“Welcome.” And, to the security guards and startled onlookers, I added, “What? Haven’t you people seen anybody attacked by the Stemmons Witches before?”

As I said it, another ripple went through the air. The nearest Witch lunged at me. Cheryl screamed, and I grabbed her and backed away. Loki, whose prurient interests were for once distracted by the much more exciting problem of saving his skin, skittered backward across the floor until he ran into me. “Don’t just stand there!” he bellowed as the Witch lurched after us. “Run!”

“Run?” I exclaimed, ducking a swinging stone arm. “Run where?”

“Just run!” Loki got to his feet and pushed us toward the main doors.

Cheryl came to this conclusion faster than I did. She ran – surprisingly fast in the high heels–across the big marble floor, ducking around security guards and pushing past the startled onlookers. I followed behind her, and we reached the main doors of City Hall just as the first swish of a stone arm went through the air above my head. We sprinted outside, the doors shut, and the first of the Stemmons Witches slammed right into it. The glass, which was bulletproof, didn’t break, but it did bow out in an alarming kind of way that suggested it would fail eventually, given enough time and enough impacts from a big concrete boulder.

Loki popped into existence next to me again. “Well, that was just great!” he yelled, flapping his arms for effect. “Why don’t you just walk up to Thor and punch him in the eye next time for good measure? And steal his hammer?”

“I think we already did that one,” I said, between pants. I was a little out of breath.

“What I’m telling you. Stop pissing off powerful beings.”

As he said it, the Stemmons-Witch-in-charge thudded off the inside of the door again. The other statues-come-to-life drew back. “We need to keep moving,” Cheryl suggested. “Where’s your car?”

“The usual place.” We all sprinted across the street toward the library, under which I left the car for my five-minute commute across the street after I dropped off Pandora (the better to be ecologically correct under the DiCaprio Mandate, you know.) We got into the lobby just as shrieks arose from across the street behind us. “Okay, that’s it. We’re getting Pandora.” I ran over to the elevator and pressed the DOWN button.

“Pandora?” Loki raised his eyebrows. “Cute little redhead, glasses, worked at TCU Library?”

“Once, a million years ago,” I retorted. “Now she’s a cute little brunette with glasses and I’ll thank you to keep your paws off her.”

“Ouch,” Loki said as we stepped into the elevator. “Do I detect a spark of jealousy?”

“We’re married in this incarnation of reality,” I said. “So paws off.”

“Mel Gibson’s going to be heartbroken,” Loki said.

Cheryl elbowed me. “You never told me you had a crush on that senator from California.”

“It’s a long story.” The elevator doors opened and we spilled out on L-1, home of the parking garage, the city print shop and, oh yeah, cataloging. I pushed through a door marked Employees Only and steered our little party of three through a maze of cubes.

Like I said, it breaks off in kind of an awkward spot. Sorry about that. If I finish it and stick it on Lulu for $4 a pop, will you buy it? My oral surgeon and I will thank you.