Victims

...Out jumped the mayor, flanked by aides who were all dressed alike and by business executives with expensive tans...

...Frannie decided to marry a man she'd met in the Throwaway Products section of the Spend More when she was rotating cartons of paper towels...

...The woman just looked off into the distance and began to hum "Oh Shenandoah ." Frannie thought it was a sign...

...One day Frannie got off the slow-moving crowded filthy dignity-crushing public transit system bus, which alienated working people were forced to use because they couldn't afford cars, only to discover that the Spend More was locked up...

...But Frannie was sanitizing toilets at the time and didn't see him...

...Eventually, though, Frannie lost interest in sex...

...But then Frannie lost interest in being a lesbian...

...Fish came there to die and men and women, to get skin cancer...

...That's right, Frannie thought...

...Discovering Frannie, they raised her as their own child...

...Once, watching a game show on their cheap television in the dreary barracks, he had suddenly grabbed Frannie and shouted, "You don't know...

...They gave her dope in return for sex...

...For the next few months she slept with dozens of women, often several at the same time...

...Returning his attention to the game show, her father seemed to forget his own existence...

...Frannie and the others hung around for a while, drinking beer and throwing rocks...

...Nevertheless, one day she was hit by a train...

...They made jokes about enlisted men like her father, cruel jokes, the sort of jokes that have echoed in the ears of the working class for centuries, but her father was too stupid to get them...

...Instead Frannie got a job cleaning washrooms at a Burger More...

...One of her lovers was a professional model who was the girlfriend of a local alleged reputed mafia boss who would later be slain execution-style while kneeling in church...

...No one knew exactly what had happened, or even if anything had happened, because she refused to talk about it...

...In time Frannie grew to like her suburban home, a home just like the one next door on a street just like the next street over in a suburb whose exact location even the residents couldn't be sure of...

...They argued about what exactly the corporation was called...

...Nothing could live on it...

...It was pointless...

...On Saturday afternoons Frannie was forced to dress up as the Burger Bandit and walk around giving packets of tartar sauce to screaming children...

...After breaking down the door the MPs were so anxious to take Frannie's father to a windowless unlabeled building where they could subject him to their legalized tortures and indignities that they forgot all about her...

...and that was too early for them...

...Each time her father put a bunny into the device, he had to adjust dozens of dials and shield his eyes...

...He wanted to make love to Frannie, but she said that would be pointless...

...No one could tell for sure...

...News of the accident was suppressed, because the train was loaded with cannisters of biological weapons that scientists did not know how to control...

...One of them used to sit on their featureless concrete living room floor and roll his ears from side to side...

...He was using a device stolen from the survival kit of an FB111...

...This is her first published work...

...Then one day two women drove up in a 1971 Ford pickup truck and announced they would be staying indefinitely...

...These dials were finely made in a huge factory in North Carolina, although all identifying marks had been carefully filed off...

...But the reports were never confirmed...

...Then from nowhere a limousine followed by several television vans pulled up...

...But the war changed him...

...It was pointless...

...A few of her co-workers were sitting on the steps...

...She cried out but no one seemed to hear...

...Officers began to crowd around, placing bets on whether the next prediction would be correct...

...People said Frannie's father had been a kind man who always donated money to the Jerry Lewis telethon...

...His children from previous marriages had grown up and had children of their own, which was occasionally awkward, since Frannie was only 14...

...Frannie got a job in Spend More working the cash register...

...He was able to predict whether the blond, the brunette, or the redhead would light up throughout the entire half-hour...

...Both it and the foregoing information were furnished by one of our contributing editors, in whose veracity in this regard alone we have no faith whatsoever...

...The cars sped away...

...Later on he admitted that the particular act probably wouldn't have been as good as it seemed in the movie anyway...

...Many years later she would come across a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings about a hostage situation at Sedgewick Air Force Base and how the little girl had never been found...

...He took her there on a day when there was no breeze...

...State troopers tipped off by Honecker's caught the women at a road block...

...Smooth and gleaming, the device had been developed by a secret agency, far more secret than the CIA, so that pilots could kill bunnies for food after dropping the nuclear bomb, when they returned to a country that didn't exist anymore...

...Everybody laughed...

...The lesbian woman was nice to Frannie and they often took long walks together, though they never touched...

...Now the link was gone...

...Modern science can work miracles...

...Acting on orders, they pumped thousands of rounds of ammunition into the car, after pausing to put on mirrored sunglasses...

...Not many of her friends came, because the ceremony was held at 11 a.m...

...But he never did...

...She was determined to apply for an interview first thing the very next morning...

...Instead he parked the truck near a cliff and threatened to jump off unless Frannie did to him something he had once seen a woman do to a man in a certain type of movie...

...The next day men with guns came to arrest her father for stealing the device...

...After one extended silence she realized he was dead...

...It turned out the two former wives had tricked her dead husband into signing a statement that he was an alien being from another plane of existence who could communicate directly with small animals...

...Everyone there dressed alike, looked alike, talked alike, and thought alike...

...At the video rental store Frannie met a handsome young man with a southern accent...

...Then they became serial murderers, brutally murdering notaries all over the country, using butcher knives, baseball bats, railroad spikes, hedge trimmers, mixmasters, and a portable electric band saw purchased on a Visa card at the Honecker's...

...It was the last Frannie would see of him, although years later she got a postcard showing a beach somewhere...

...Much, much, much later Frannie would learn that the two former wives had faked the statement by brutally murdering a notary public and stealing his seal...

...The camera crews began shooting and the mayor announced that the Spend More would soon be torn down and converted by the Mega Management subsidiary of Multi/Uni-Omni Corp...

...A reporter asked Frannie what she thought and she said she didn't know...

...For days Frannie remained in the hamper...

...They were the husband's exwives and had lived together in Albuquerque since meeting by chance at his lawyer's office...

...But they never did...

...The beach looked hot and flat...

...Attendants in dirty smocks were hanging around the halls smoking dope, but a social worker told Frannie not to pay attention...

...Perhaps she could get a job as an auditor, embark on a real career with responsibility and dignity...

...He was always on a time payment plan and didn't even know it...

...Maybe life wasn't even a dream, just the illusion of a dream...

...This statement was used as evidence that he had been insane at the time of his marriage to Frannie, voiding the will...

...Frannie liked the attendants...

...Someone was moving in...

...She thought of the dead bunnies, so soft...

...Yet still they were both loyal to the church...

...So she bought the bunnies and put them in a cage decorated with photographs of grass...

...Before Frannie's mother disappeared she had complained about the concrete, but nothing was ever done...

...So instead they drove around together for hours not speaking...

...So he decided not to...

...It was the Visa card that brought to an end this horrible commentary on the condition of mankind...

...Somebody said a huge distant corporation that owned Spend More had decided to close the whole chain in order to get tax benefits...

...On his way back from the home the sergeant was gunned down by FBI agents who mistook him for a wanted terrorist...

...Sometimes the assistant manager let her rotate stock...

...The following morning Frannie called an ambulance...

...He wore a jean jacket and carried a guitar in his 1980 Datsun pickup truck...

...On the way back to the store the voltage regulator on the Datsun burned out...

...Frannie's new mother prayed and crossed herself constantly...

...She has won the Hugo Emmanuel Lancaster Prize for fiction, the Carson Award for autobiographical research, and several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...That night after closing she and some of her co-workers hung around in the parking lot, drinking beers and throwing rocks...

...He was 63 and missing the left side of his nose...

...The tiny cramped house had been assigned to a young sergeant and his childless wife who had been rendered mute by a freak accident on her confirmation day...

...She sat through the night with the television on watching his form bathed in the gray flickering reflection from a cable station which showed "Mannix" reruns 24 hours a day...

...Anyway, it hardly mattered, since the postcard was not from him...

...She was not paid extra even though the costume was very hot...

...The years passed, meaninglessly...

...A tow truck came and the mechanic said many breakdowns were caused by constant though imperceptible strain...

...To bring life to this lifeless place of destruction and death, she had said...

...But Frannie felt a moment in her life had been lost and could never return...

...One was three-quarters Iroquois and the other was a lesbian...

...Finally noises came from outside the hamper...

...Often he seemed just about to pick up the guitar and sing a lyrical song full of purpose...

...Once, Frannie asked what it was like to be a lesbian...

...Now, on the anniversary of the disappearance, Frannie's father was taking the bunnies out one by one and killing them...

...You weren't on the mission...

...Frannie found this woman very glamorous and wanted to become a mobster so that she could have a glamorous girlfriend too...

...He refused to talk about the war, even to say which war it had been...

...He hid Frannie in a clothing hamper and she heard his voice, electric with rage even though he felt nothing...

...The union went fairly well...

...The rage flowed into him from some other place, some place of horror...

...Some of the attendants were black and she loved their blackness...

...People came in to buy things, many people, and often just as they were reaching for their receipts they seemed about to say something...

...Later the insurance company received a bill for $89,000, but a sharp-eyed claims auditor got it reduced to $170.55...

...The lawyers said there was nothing they could do because the statement had been notarized...

...The widowed sergeant felt he was to blame and decided Frannie would be better off in the county foster home...

...When the men pounded on the door, Frannie's father refused to come out...

...Just as quickly, the fury released him...

...She felt herself changing...

...Frannie and her husband had less and less to talk about...

...One, so black he didn't seem white at all, would bring her jumbo bags of McDonald's french fries that they would eat the next morning...

...Then the mayor shook hands with Frannie and her friends and thanked them for "their show of support...

...One day Frannie's father came into the Burger More for a Double More, a Phake Shake, and fries...

...A time payment plan, Frannie thought...

...one paramedic said unquestioningly as he attached complex electrical devices...

...One of the officers touched Frannie's thigh and told her the world would end someday...

...The featureless flat concrete of the air base stretched forever...

...Frannie wondered just how different an official murder was from a criminal one...

...But then she forgot all about it...

...Paramedics spent two hours attempting to revive her husband, even though his body was at room temperature...

...That made her happy, the change of pace...

...Frannie felt no emotion as she watched...

...Frannie was thrilled by such mental rigor...

...There was no grass or trees...

...Propped in his Laz-E-Boy recliner purchased on a time payment plan at the Honecker's on 28th street near the expressway, staring off at something Frannie couldn't quite see...

...It had been designed that way at great expense...

...Frannie thought he was sensing the presence of alien beings...

...Holidays were the worst...

...In the enlisted personnel zone where they lived, even the backyards of the houses were concrete...

...Louella Thiriot is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of the Southwest in New Mexico, where she won the Roger and Gloria Stanhardy Citation for her doctoral thesis, "Deconstruction of Free Verse...

...into the nation's most technologically advanced toxic waste processing site...

...Frannie told him jumping would prove nothing...

...A commission investigated the killing, but no conclusion was ever reached...

...His hearing was poor so Frannie's music did not bother him...

...Often she went to bed with several a day...

...There was never any question of college...

...Soldiers were marching by outside but none of them seemed to hear...

...Frannie sent for a brochure on opportunities in insurance claim auditing and spent hours studying the paragraphs intently...

...I have never been found...

...At least they thought she prayed...

...The device made no sound...

...That was all the little girl could remember of her mother, a loving, peaceful woman who cooked french fries every night and always made extra to pack with sandwiches...

...According to news reports, internal memos of the commission were inadvertently destroyed...