“Oh, I’m back! I’m back!” those people all said. “I thought I’d never see this place again.”

When asked where they had gone, many promptly died of old age.

Others have not reappeared at all.

Even those who were lucky enough not to disappear still reported odd side effects of the flamingos.

“Yeah, I touched one,” said Sheila, the woman who always marks people’s activities down on her clipboard at the Moonlite All-Nite. “And the world shown clear for the first time in my life. Like I had never seen any of it before. I had never seen any of it before, and I understood none of it. Which is when I realized that I had become myself as a baby again. I lived my entire life over again, making the same choices, surviving the same tragedy and surviving the same joy, and going through all the same mistakes, unable to stop myself, until I reached the moment again where I touched the flamingo, and then I was an infant again. I have gone through this loop hundreds of times. My life, which once seemed like an organic movement, now has become a hideous script that I must play out, with an ending that is forever forestalled. I won’t ever die, but I won’t ever live. Please help.”

And then, weeping, she touched the flamingo again.

There have also been some complaints that the plastic on the flamingos is cheaply produced and warped. Has Lenny’s Bargain House been selling us substandard and possibly time-bending decorative birds? We will investigate at some point in the future, when we feel like we are maybe more interested than we are now. Until then, we will continue on in ignorance, happy as we ever were.

And now, we are pleased to present three commercial-free hours of advertisements.

28

They ran past the nonfiction shelves, filled with informative books on every subject not currently outlawed by city government, or the Sheriff’s Secret Police, or the World Government. The shelves were mostly empty. They tried to keep their footfalls as soft as possible.

In Jackie’s case, this resulted in only her usual heavy-heeled thuds.

Gently. Silence over speed, Diane thought, glaring at the teenager’s back but not wanting to say it out loud.

Hurry the hell up, Jackie thought, as Diane lagged behind.

After nonfiction was science fiction. No one knows why science fiction is kept separately from the rest of the nonfiction. Tradition is a powerful thing. These shelves were much less censored than the main nonfiction section, since science fiction tended to be about day-to-day stuff that everyone already knew.

They hid against a long row of novels, most titles unreadable under a gnashing of teeth and claw marks. Diane looked up to see a shelf full of Ursula K. Le Guin books, streaked with four long, brownish stains. Poor book lover, Diane thought, dragged away just as they found that perfect read.