I'm Happy to Have Fiction in the Current Issue of Clavmag

I love the way this magazine is opening a new frontier of fiction and other genres, hybrid genres, informed by LGBTQIA inventiveness.

I also love their name and logo. Visit the magazine to read about why the clavicle was chosen as the objective correlative. It's rather fascinating.

Thanks much to editors Freya and Gabrielle for including my short story. 

Pound

“Timmy’s missing again,” my wife sighed as she lorded it over the stove top, stirring a wooden spoon slowly in a pot. “And dinner will be ready in less than an hour.”

I sighed back, “I’ll check the pound.”

As usual, the parking lot was packed. It wasn’t a long drive, though, so I was there in fifteen minutes and walking past all the children whose fingers were invariably wrapped tightly around the wires of their cage fronts or poking through those wires, as they eyed me and shouted out, “Pick me, Sir! Pick me!” A pasty-looking girl in a ridiculous pinafore barked, “I get straight As! I’ve only had one B in my entire life!” As I drew closer to give her a second look, she snarled and then bounded out through the hole at the back of her cage into the exercise yard, presumably to bite another child.

I saw Timmy consorting with the child in the cage next to his. They were trading something, some sort of contraband. Timmy smiled up at me broadly and asked me what’s for supper. I won’t reproduce the string of invective that flowed from his mouth as I called the kennel tender to open the cage of the child next to his. I didn’t look back once as we three went off together, to sign the papers and pay the fine.

I arrived home with three minutes to spare. The large empty bowls were on the dining room table. My wife smiled much more peacefully as she ladled out the mix of vegetables and who knows what else.

“Welcome home,….?” she said to the boy sitting in Timmy’s chair.

“Ralph,” he finished her sentence. He had heard the question mark.

“Thank you, Mother,” he chimed as he began spooning the stewy muck into his mouth.

“I’m Mom, but I’m also Doris,” she explained, pointing to her chest with her expensively manicured index finger. Her apron had “Fran” stitched on it in red thread.

“I love my family so goddamn much!” I barked in my gruffest dad voice. “Let’s go pass a football after dinner!”

“Indeed, father,” Ralph said, as casual as any psychopathic child. “Footballs are the super-glue of families.”

Mr. Bully Boy, our pit bull, came trotting into the dining room just then and took a chunk out of my wife’s leg, then threw his huge body against the screen door out in the kitchen, which gave way, and ran off to enjoy it somewhere.

“He doesn’t know her yet,” I explained to the boy as my wife went off to bandage her gaping wound.

“Maybe you should take him to the pound, Dad,” Ralph wisely suggested. I liked this kid already.

“Actually, how do you feel about a new mommy?” I asked, as I stroked the chip-off-the-old-block’s hair.

“It sounds like a capital idea, Sir.” my son whispered ingratiatingly. “The spicing of this stew is pedestrian at best.”

But as I went to pee, I heard my wife on the phone in the next room, in total darkness. I could hear the pretend panic in her voice. We’ve all gotten so good at that pretend panic voice now.

“Is this the pound? Listen, there’s a strange man in my house. He’s impersonating my husband. Please hurry. And bring the right goddamn sedatives this time. The last husband ruined my china before you got him to the van. What sort of amateurs are you hiring these days?”

I went into my bedroom and started packing, loading my pockets with a few of my favorite things.

And then I thought about how to say goodbye to my son. I tried to remember words from a television movie I really hated.

Too bad she beat me to the dial. I’m going to miss that kid. One more call and I think we could have had the family just right. The dog knew she was wrong for the role. Dogs always know. I’m gonna miss that dog.

I heard the van brake loudly out front just then, so I sat on the edge of my bed and prepared to act surprised and emotionally wounded.

An Ear for Crime

Hickory, dickory dock,

I selected the Hickory family. I had to choose the right one. There were several families with the surname Hickory in this city, in its suburbs. I drove and drove. So many days, so many nights. I scouted. Studied houses and yards patiently. Until I saw the ones with the clock. Right there in their backyard. I knew then. They were the ones.

The mouse ran up the clock.

It was the sundial in the backyard. The clock. I placed it against the wall which I knew had the best window for a stealth entrance. By then, I knew the Hickory family’s schedule. I knew when the kids went to bed. When the parents did. The rooms were all dark that night when I stood on the sundial and leaned against the wall, next to the pretty trellis. I used the glass cutter. I unlocked the window. I was in to do my business. I must say it all went beautifully. Not a whimper, not a pleading out of place.

The clock struck one,

They actually had a grandfather clock in there. Imagine that. I heard it strike one a.m. And people say there’s no such thing as fate. There was one Hickory left alive by then. Her eyes pleaded with me. Her mouth couldn’t. Not with that gag. I had recited the rhyme enough by then, that she must have known what was coming, what that sound from the downstairs clock meant. She must have known that it was time for me to leave. Finishing time. And so I did.

The mouse ran down!

I went out the way I came in. Down to the clock and off through the backyard, racing into the shadows of the bushes and the trees. Then through dark neighboring yards. My car was parked several streets away, where it would not arouse suspicion. I must say I was pleased with the way it all went down. It was the night of the new moon. The cool dark of that night on my skin felt so nice. Thank You, Moon. It took everything I had not to steal peeks at the videos I had recorded of the Hickorys. Such fun we all had. But I waited until I got home.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The obituaries for the Hickory family were sanitized. The news stories splashed across the front pages, and all over the airwaves and internet, were more sensationalized. Television’s talking heads were fascinated by the murders. They loved that I had left the nursery rhyme behind. They loved that I had left a sprung mouse-trap on each of their bodies. That sort of thing plays well in the tabloids.

But not all the details were released. The police like to hold some gruesome facts back. I get it. They have to play the hand they’re dealt. They have to hold those cards close. To see who knows what. So the darling public didn’t get to learn that the dearly departed indeed showed signs that a mouse had visited. None of the news stories mentioned the gnawing.

For those following my work in the press, they’ll have other rhyme crimes to read about in the near future. Unfortunately, some will be discovered out of sequence. There’s Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, that old battle-axe who writes those letters to the editor constantly. I finished that one months ago. But Mary has yet to return to her gardening . Come spring, when she finally gets back to tending her silver bells and cockle shells, she should find them. I mean those pretty maids all in a row.

I hope she writes a letter to the editor about that one.

I Wrote This Short Piece of Fiction (I Swear) While I Was Asleep

I was really typing while asleep. I remember thinking when I woke up that it would probably have all sorts of trippy leaps that made no sense. But it seemed to read okay. It's louche prose, sure. But I wanted louche.

I think it might qualify as "exciting porn" in Japan. Not sure.

Miss Swan

Rita saw the girls were playing in the park again. Virtually every young girl in town must be in there, she thought, as she watched the youngsters across the street gallop about, playing some sort of game which involved one child running up to another and whispering something in her ear. It was such a gift of a day. Summer had indeed delivered on spring’s verdant promises and The Lawn (as the park was known to the townspeople) was almost green enough to shock the eyes, top to bottom, from grass blades to treetops.


Rita smiled and waved now at the children through the picture window at the front of her small house. Ether none could see her from that distance, or none cared to wave back. The woman’s features darkened as she realized the summer day would be so much more beautiful were the country not at war. It would truly be a wonderful day then. If only the town’s husbands and sons were here and not in Europe and all those other theaters of the nearly unimaginable global conflict. How could all that be happening over there when a heavenly day was right outside her front door?


Before she knew what she was doing, the young woman had shot out the front door of her house, crossed the street and was now entering the open iron gate of The Lawn. Though she had not been fortunate enough to have any children yet with Randy, who was now writing her cheering letters from The Philippines, she certainly hoped that darling little beings would grace their home in the near future. If only the dreadful war would end.


She was surprised that her arrival in the park seemed to throw the girls into a tizzy. They had stopped playing their unidentifiable game. Though they were scattered throughout the park, they all stopped at once, as if they were mechanical figures in a clock that had run down. And they all stared intently at her. Their chatter died.


Rita smiled and called out, “Hello, children!” She felt silly. It was an awkward moment. Children, too, value their privacy. Why had she come, she wondered.


But here was Suzie Mills taking her right hand, walking her down the path towards the pond, smiling brightly up at her. Here was the welcome she supposed now she had expected all along.


“Why, hello Suzie! Are you children having fun in the park today?”


“Oh yes, Miss Figgis! Father is overseas and mother is working in a factory. The one where my brother Paulie worked last year. Imagine that! Thank Goodness we have Miss Swan!”


“Miss Swan?” Rita asked with puzzlement.


“Oh yes, Miss Swan is wonderful,” Angela Lucarno chimed in, as she grabbed Rita’s available hand and jointly walked her down the path with Suzie.


“I don’t recall anyone named ‘Miss Swan’ in town. Is she a visitor?”


Both girls laughed at once.


“Oh yes, she is a visitor!” It was Angela. It had sounded fresh, that reply. She always had been a take-charge type of little girl, Rita remembered. Takes after her mother, she smiled inwardly. She realized all of the girls had been overly rambunctious lately. They had much less guidance these days. Though the adults had tried their best, clearly there was some neglect. Wild strains of children might be emerging.


Rita noticed that all of the girls were wearing white. Pristine whites. The effect was a bit uncanny.


“Girls, is there to be a photograph taken today? Here in the park?”


“What a queer thing to say!” Suzie sniped.


“Suzie! Your manners! Miss Swan would not approve,” Angela chided.


“Sorry. No, Miss Figgis. We’re not having our picture taken today.”


Rita noticed that many of the girls were wearing not merely Sunday whites but what appeared to be their communion dresses. How odd. As if Angela had read the woman’s mind, she suddenly offered an unbidden explanation.


“Miss Swan likes us to wear white. Well, certain days. Like today. She receives gifts and she gives them. We always wear white on gift days. Doesn’t that sound nice, Miss Figgis?”


Rita had no idea what the child was talking about. Was there a new church group active in the park?


“How do I meet this Miss Swan?” Rita asked Angela.


“We’re taking you to her now,” the girls said in singsong unison.


The trio had just reached the pond behind the kitchen garden.. This outbuilding was all that remained of the mill superintendent’s mansion whose property this had once been. Indeed, the iron gate through which Rita had just passed had been, many years ago, his perimeter fence. The land had simply been deeded back to the town several generations back. The pond was behind the kitchen garden. It was spiritedly reflecting light. Angela noticed this radiated light before she saw the water itself. A tallness of wild, orange lilies shielded much of the pond from view.


Rita noticed then that all the other girls in white were standing stock-still, and that they were all staring intently at her.


“Where are the boys?” Rita thought to ask then. “I know you don’t play with them, but aren’t they usually in the park, playing one of their games, over there?”


She pointed to where she had seen the boys playing football on so many past days. She realized suddenly it had been quite some time since she had seen the boys there. Perhaps they had started a club somewhere or were off following the railroad tracks. Boys like to do things like that.


“Boys aren’t allowed in the park, anymore. Miss Swan’s rules.”


This voice came from behind her, causing Rita to spin around. It was Julie, her neighbor’s girl. Maybe eight years old. Maybe nine. She had forgotten.


“Hello, Julie. I haven’t seen your mother since she took that new job. She’s working quite a bit, isn’t she?”


“Yes,” Julie replied dryly. “Father is fighting in the war. Mother is working very hard. It’s a good thing Miss Swan is here. That’s for sure.”


Rita laughed then. It wasn’t really funny, was it? But she couldn’t help herself. Was it a practical joke the children had conceived. The little devils couldn’t be that clever, could they? And they were all so young.


“But come and meet Miss Swan,” Maureen said now, shooting in and replacing Suzie’s hand with her own. She had done it effortlessly, the way older children always do with younger children.


By now, a large group of girls of diverse ages (but none older than twelve in her estimation) in white had gathered about Rita and shepherded her behind the old, disused summer kitchen with the milky windows and wild vines groping it all over.


Here was the dark pond with the secret warm spring hidden in its center, feeding its life. So much algae floated in there and duckweed was scattered across the top like green living confetti. Here were the tall sedgy plants that surrounded it, the dragonflies skirting the water and the wildflowers savagely blooming without cultivation.


And here was a large black swan turning circles in the center of the pond.


Rita laughed loudly this time, unable to restrain herself.


“Why, this is ‘Miss Swan?’” she chortled in disbelief.


Wherever had it come from? Such an exotic specimen was certainly not native! Had it escaped from a zoo?


The children looked at Rita with expressions of stern disapprobation.


“What’s so funny?” Maureen asked.


“Well, I thought when you said ‘Miss Swan,’ that I would be meeting a….”


And that’s when she saw it. Before she could even finish her sentence, she saw the small arm floating there in the center of the pond. It was a child! Her senses all sounded their alarms at once. The swan was swimming with peaceful aplomb around the body in wide concentric circles.


Rita screamed, “Go get help!” as she charged into the pond, first running and then trudging through the water, through thick sludge that lay at the bottom, to reach the child. The water was not very deep and she only lost her footing once when she stepped into a hole or unevenness.


“Miss Swan” removed herself from this focus of furious activity. She shook her great wings and retreated to one corner of the pond, where she glared with seeming disapproval at the rescue underway. The fire opals of her eyes dartled at the children. The children began to mimic Miss Swan, pretending they had wings and flapping them. All of them did it. Rita never saw.


As soon as she had pulled the child to her, Rita felt a second shiv of horror go through her. She knew him. The drowned boy. It was Clyde Geary. She knew his entire family.


She was shaking and crying now, and when she turned back to the bank, holding little Clyde to her breast, she saw the girls simply stood there, a wall of white,staring blankly at her.


“Who went for help?” she screamed as she pulled the boy up onto the grass. She listened for his heartbeat. There was nothing. But she had already begun the physical efforts to revive him.


“No one did,” Sally said coolly.


“I told you to go get help!” She was furious now. Clearly these girls had been running wild all summer. They had no respect for adult authority and no understanding of the gravity of this situation.


But she knew it was pointless. He was so cold. Even on a hot summer day, he was cold. Even floating in the jets from the warm spring under the pond, the secret at its heart, he was cold. She gave herself a pointless little hope that the boy would somehow come around. Her efforts were futile. She could feel he was sodden. The body was sodden. She knew his lungs were full of pond water and, probably, duckweed. Why had that image come to her?


The girls in white began to scatter. They ran home to their empty, furnished houses. Because that is what Rita had shouted at them to do. She wanted them to stop staring. Above everything else, that is what she wanted.


When she looked back over her shoulder, the pond was empty.


Rita thought about Randy She wished he were there at that moment. Now more than ever she had wished it before. She cried when she realized she didn’t have the strength to carry the boy. It was all so pitiful. So she left the park. She left the boy lying there, fully clothed, on the sunny summer grass. Next to the pond. The pond that was radiant with afternoon light. She went for useless help. She forced herself to run, though she knew it was a joke.


                                 * * * * * * * *


As the years passed, Rita talked of that day less and less.


She had tried to explain it to herself. She had tried to have others explain it to her. It all came to naught. She had even tried to talk to some of the girls who had been there that day, but they all seemed terribly embarrassed and confused by what had happened. They had all insisted that they were blameless. They had no idea how Clyde had come to drown in the pond wearing all his clothes, even his shoes. There had been no bathing suit on the boy. When she asked the children about “Miss Swan,” they had either forgotten her altogether or else they were all perfect little liars. One of them had told her with a straight face, “I vaguely remember that name as a game we once played, but I can’t really remember the rules.”


Occasionally, she would spy one of the girls, years later, on the street or while out shopping somewhere, and try to corner her. But she got no further in her understanding of that day. All of the girls were blank or innocent or the most deceitful creatures on earth.


And so that was how the matter darkened in Rita’s memory and in the memory of the town.


The black swan had been the subject of a search undertaken shortly after the drowning, but it came to nothing. Some had even the audacity to suggest that Rita had hallucinated the bird or had mistaken one species (“perhaps an egret?”) for another.


Much later, the pond was filled in for a new development project and the park became a shopping mall. Rita was sauntering through there one afternoon. By then, she was an octogenarian. She found herself staring at the fountain in the center of the mall, unable to look away.


By then her memory was going, and before she could explain what had occurred that immemorial day to another generation, her grandchild took her by the hand to lead her away from it. She wanted to lead her away from the mall’s artificial pond and whatever fascination it was that it held. Whatever it was which had darkened the poor old woman’s features for a few moments.

Friend

Keiko followed Marissa down the hallway, but at a safe distance. She blended into the crowd of other girls changing classes. If Marissa had looked back, she would have seen Keiko just standing there, the one still point in that flux of bodies. She would have stood out. And Marissa would have seen her odd stare.

But Marissa didn't look back. She entered the girls bathroom.

Keiko waited as the girls aflutter with conversation, with graded papers in their hands, vanished into the doors of classrooms up and down the hallway. They broke up quickly, like a cloud of butterflies or a snow squall that is over as soon as it's begun

Only Keiko was left standing there. Like a statue in the hallway.

She slowly made her way to the door of the girls bathroom. She made no more sound than a cat. That's how she visualized herself as she looked down at her shoes while she walked.

She managed to open the bathroom door as quietly as it was humanly possible and crept inside.

Marissa was standing at one of the sinks, combing her hair.

"Hello, Keiko," the older girl greeted her. She never turned her head to acknowledge the other girl, and there was no way she could have seen her in the mirror. She was just always aware of everything like that.

Keiko advanced but remained silent.

"Oh, silly me. I forgot to flush," Marissa said. She still hadn't looked at Keiko and continued to fuss with her hair.

Keiko walked to the toilet stall opposite the sink at which Marissa was standing She went to flush the toilet and then realized something was swimming around in the bowl.

She gasped.

"Disgusting, I know," Marissa laughed.

It looked like a salamander. But not quite. It wasn't any animal Keiko had ever seen and she loved to look at books filled with photographs of animals. Then she got a better look at it. It looked like several seahorses glued together.

"You're not going to tell anybody, are you?" Marissa's voice was pure sarcasm. It was a threat.

Now, finally,  Marissa turned and in one quick jump was at the toilet. She used her hand to scoop out the creature swimming around in there, and brought it up to Keiko's mouth, as she forced the younger girl against the wall of the toilet stall.

Keiko tried to fight her but Marissa was so strong. She forced the creature into Keiko's mouth, and by using her hand to nearly suffocate her, forced her to swallow the slimy, jagged creature.

Keiko felt the creature scrambling around in her mouth. Then she could feel the thing making its way down her throat. She knew the moment when it reached her stomach. Marissa stepped back and smiled.

"No, you're not going to tell anyone." She smiled.. It was the same wicked smile which had first attracted Keiko to her, which had made her want her for a friend. Though her other friends had warned her. Even her mother, who liked all children, had disapproved.

"Be good and I'll tell you what it eats. Be even better and I'll tell you how to get rid of it. Are you going to be good?"

Keiko nodded in fear.

"Good. Now you better get back to class. Social studies, isn't it?"

Keiko ran from the bathroom, feeling like she was going to throw up. If only it were that simple, she thought.

Happy Birthday

How old was the Eckes boy when he disappeared?

That's what Joe really wanted to know.

Once a year, that creepy old dude who now lived alone in the Eckes house would come into the bakery department and place an order for a customized "Happy Birthday!" cake. Last year, it had been "Happy 9th Birthday!" This year it was a birthday cake for a happy tenth.

"Please just give me your basic, generic boy's cake," the old man had said.

"Who even talks like that?" Joe had muttered to one of his co-workers the second the old creep was gone.

Joe always made the cakes to order and the old man, Edgar, that's all anyone really knew about him, his name, had always picked them up shortly thereafter.

Some of the girls in the bakery said Joe was being too harsh, that it was probably a part of the grieving process for him. It was a way he remembered his son.

"Not son," Joe would correct the women. "It was his stepson."

Joe finally found the article the night the creepy old dude had picked up the "Happy 10th Birthday" cake. It had been archived online by the local newspaper four years ago: "Six Year Old Boy Missing." So the birthday cakes were definitely keeping up with Damian's birthdays. But the date was wrong. Joe read the article again. Damian Eckes was believed to have disappeared somewhere on the walk home from his elementary school. It had only been a five block walk. Joe wasn't convinced he hadn't made it home and disappeared from there. But the police had found nothing which made Edgar anything more than a person of interest, at first, and then he had been cleared. Joe began to wonder if the boy wasn't still alive somewhere in that big house that creepy Edgar had inherited. For the boy's mother had also gone missing. Two years after her son's disappearance. True, there had been a suicide note and her grief at the loss of her son had been crippling. The woman was inconsolable. That had been her only child. So the suicide had been understandable to most. There was little suspicion. Her car had been found parked by a bridge over a river that had been in full spring torrent at the time. But her body had also never been recovered. Joe wondered about that too.

Joe had called the local police and talked to his old classmate Ed Shanks, who was sheriff now, but had been politely told to mind his own business. The missing boy case was ongoing and the case of his mother had been closed. That's all he could tell the baker playing amateur detective and thanks for calling, Joe, see you at the next high school reunion.

Joe decided that wasn't good enough.

It was a moonless night and Joe was creeping around the Eckes house. He couldn't get over how weird the old man was. He saw there was a chicken coop out back now. Everyone put the man's eccentric qualities down to the double loss he had suffered. They all made excuses for him. But Joe couldn't see it that way, and tonight he was putting that serious suspicion into action.

As he crept around the back of the house, he noticed the back door was wide open. It was a warm summer night.  Maybe the guy was baking. The light from the kitchen lay in a long plank across the backyard, nearly touching the edge of a dark cornfield that covered many acres back. There were no other houses in sight back there.

Joe edged along the house and noticed the two basement windows were painted black. There were also rocks piled up against them, blocking all but a soupcon of the basement light, which was so dim as to make one wondered if one imagined it, if there was really light at all.  But there seemed to be a slight flickering. The windows were mostly buried. Flowering bushes and rocks had been banked up against them, curiously.

Joe had made it up to the back door now, edging along the back wall of the house, and he took a quick peek into the kitchen. There was nobody to be seen. The table was covered by what appeared to be a new, attractively colored cloth. There was a centerpiece and the usual assortment: sugar bowl, shakers, cruets, fruit bowl.

Joe could hear music somewhere. He listened carefully. It was "Happy Birthday." He had pulled his head back after that first quick glance, but now he looked again. It was coming from behind the basement door, which was shut.

Joe felt a sudden boiling of bravery that came out of a boil of insatiable curiosity and he charged the door. Just like that. He realized he didn't even have his cell phone on him. How smart a thing was this to do, he wondered. But he knew he could take that old man. He wanted to take that old man.

"Hey!" he shouted as he yanked the door open so hard it banged against the corner of a kitchen counter, scarring the yellow door. "I'm coming down there!"

It was dim and the old wooden stairs were rickety. "Happy Birthday" was coming from an old record player in the corner of the basement. It was a scratchy old record and this version of the song sounded like something from a kid's show in the fifties. It sounded like a television cowboy singing. Joe saw why it was dim as soon as he reached the basement floor. The single, unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling had been coated with red paint. It was unbelievably warm. Joe felt himself start to sweat right away. It was just that hot.

He saw the cake on a low end table in one corner of the room. It had not been sliced. Ten small candles were now burning atop it.

"Hey! Kid! Where are you? Damian, are you here?"

Joe heard a rustling in the corner. He saw something there, a gathered mass, but he couldn't make out what he was actually seeing. It looked like a dark blanket. But it looked full and there was a stirring under it. Was it the poor kid help captive all these years by that freak? And where was that freak right now? Joe's eyes searched for the sort of tool you always find in basements, anything that might be used as a weapon, but he saw nothing.

And then he felt it and screamed. Something had reached out and touched his ankle. It was gripping his leg through the thick denim of his jeans. A hand?  It was so dark he couldn't see. It must be the boy's hand, his mind told him. Get the boy up and moving and get the hell out of there, his mind told him.

But now the "hand" of the "boy" was growing longer and longer, winding up Joe's leg, and down Joe went, struggling. He ended up yanking the blanket for which he had been reaching, and that's when he saw the full size of the creature. Coils and coils of it. It was the sort of pet people warn you against keeping. Because they never stop growing and their appetite grows exponentially too. And it was all over Joe now, all through and around Joe now, tightening. "Amazon" was one of Joe's last thoughts as he heard the door at the top of the stairs slam shut. Now he knew why it was so hot. He also knew where Damian and Julia Eckes were. And he knew he was going to the same dark place.

Great Deal

A young woman was left without a couch when her roommate moved out and took it with her. She went on Craigslist and found one she thought was a steal. It was a model that sells for close to two thousand dollars retail and the owner was asking only six hundred and fifty, with no apparent condition issues.

The young woman was very security-conscious, but the seller was up front in dealing with her worries and had actually crafted a very humorous ad designed to assuage the fears of any potential buyers. He joked about having given up cannibalism "five years ago." She talked to the middle-age man on the phone and he seemed trustworthy, a bit bland actually, but she was a very careful young woman. She told him she would be bringing two strong male friends along to load and move the couch for her (this was true). The couch seller was fine with that but explained that with his work schedule he could not be present for the pickup. However, he could leave the couch in his unlocked garage and  and she could just pick it up. She could complete the transaction through Paypal or leave a check in his garage. She chose to do the latter. She thought it was nice of him to trust her in this manner.

Her muscly guy friends helped her get the leather couch into her apartment, enjoyed the pizzas and beers she had provided as "payment," and then went home to their respective partners. She couldn't stop admiring the lovely couch. It was pristine. She sat on it for a few hours, watched her favorite shows and finally went to bed.

The next day she was missing. She hasn't been seen since. Video cameras in her apartment building showed (presumptively) the man from whom she had bought the couch leaving her apartment, carrying a sleeping bag with a body in it. It is virtually certain she was the one in the sleeping bag. Whether alive or dead, nobody knows. The police discovered a compartment in the bottom of the large couch where they figured the man had secreted himself and from which he had emerged after she had gone to bed. She had supervised the carrying of her abductor into her apartment. The house from which she had removed the couch was discovered to have two corpses in it, the former residents and true owners of the couch. Nobody knows who the man is or his present whereabouts. The check the woman had left was made out to a fictitious name, Hugh Lusall. The police  detectives working the case believe this to be a sick pun for "you lose all."