The whereabouts of Curtis Thumb and his Grandson Andrew (13) are currently unknown. They have stopped that Curtis’s pension. The truant officer has wrote a letter to that Andrew. The terrace house (located, with some great apparent irony, on Continuum Street) is boarded up and being dismantled in detail again and again, with some hope and expectation by the people in the white spacesuit things from CERN or NASA or whatever whose results and conclusions we all so very eagerly, and in perpetuity, await.

I thought I smelled something dirty

I thought I smelled something dirty

I THOUGHT I SMELLED SOMETHING DIRTY

That was what someone had painted on the wall under her apartment and she tried hard not to take it personally but those ideas get in you like shrapnel from the landmines where you cannot stop it.

So that Summer she sank in a depression. It was like when Titanic was headed for a Iceberg – they said lookout and the loser Captain said No it is OK but it was not OK. With her it was the same. For a long while she could see the Depression far off on the horizon line like aftermath of a skirmish, all heat hazes and Fog – and she knew she was heading straight for it but she thought OK, OK, she can deal with that. But then she could not and she sank.

Her friend came round to cheer her up but that didn’t work. Her mom called but made things worse. A ‘bird’ came to sing at her window but in one week the batteries ran down and it sat there getting rusted.

*

Maybe in September the teenage kid from over the hallway tried the door to her place and finding it open, stepped in. People said the kid was somehow defective – with a disjointed body or disconnected mind and a t-shirt that said IRRESPECTIVE OF ANYTHING. The neighbours were nothing if not ‘quick to accuse’. They said it was him who wrote that sentence on outside of the building but there was no proof, you could not pin it on him. If you tried to pin it on him he would run. And you could not catch him. That was how the argument went.

In Jessica’s apartment that fated afternoon the kid made himself right at home by watching loud re-runs of DEAD END and TERROR TOWN and eating any foods he could find and when he was tired stayed lying around, stretched on the Red Couch with his too-big dirty neglected feet.

He did not notice that under the sheets of that bed in the corner of the room was the Jessica person lying hidden, curled up tite in her State of Depressions. He thought he had the hole place to himself.

*