Chapter 1
With Bella Freestone being the blond and Baba Savarin the red-head (although her rinse was probably made from discarded pennies), Martie (Lily Martagon Turkscap) was conveniently the brunette.Right then, she was showing the assembled only this head of black, black, black hair, since her face was slumped over into her hands in despairing weepiness.After a dainty sniff of self-pity, she raised her face.No one could have pegged her as belonging to any particular race, color, ethnicity, or DNA haplogroup, but she appeared youngish, her tears and pouty mouth suggesting late adolescence.
The table quieted, awaiting some delicious revelation, but Martie only sniffed again and stared at the tabletop.(She may have just come from watching the mock public hanging at the Merryweather Historical Park and could not rid her brain of the harshness of life during our town’s mediaeval period.)
After another sniffle, she wiped an eye and fiddled with her own Birkin Bag.(Bella knew that this could upset the ecology of the table, but with extermination looming, there was no time to fret about environmental niceties.)Martie drew herself up, apparently collecting her emotions, only to collapse with a quiet wail.“Why?” she lamented.“Why?Just tell me, somebody.”
The other ladies bent incrementally towards her, ready to smother her in sympathy.
“I’m know I’m late,” said Martie with a daub to the eyes.“But I was stuck behind someone going the speed limit.”Bella read the reactions among the ladies: mixed, but a straw poll coming out in sympathy with Martie.
The Brahmin Bag said, “I mean, who does that?” and a pantomime-chorus of nods erupted about the table.
“I know what you mean,” said the Swarowski.“I mean, why do those people exist, really?”Then, in a camphor-flame of inspiration, “Those people just need to die.Why can’t we just round them up and put them somewhere to die?”Now the nodding was furious.“Or take them to the woods and hunt them?”
The Kelly Bag said, “I’ll call Barb.She has some pull in the state senate.”One big nod from the Birkin Bag and a hum of agreement for good measure.
“Well,” sniffed Martie, wiping the periphery of her eyes to preserve her make-up, “I’m glad someone’s on our side.”
Bella saw this as a window through which to defenestrate some excess bodies.“Hey,” she said.“Has anybody heard about the No Store?” and Bella saw in their faces the gaze of wolves scenting a wounded prey.“It doesn’t have a name.I mean, who cares about the name?You just want good stuff.”At this, she gave Baba and Martie each a quick look, narrow-eyed and confidential, to signal that this was all bosh.
“Oh, where is it?” asked the Kelly Bag, with an almost proprietary desire to be the first from among their little clutch to claim a visit.
Bella took half a beat to concoct an address.“2525, I think.Center Street.”During her knowledge infusion sessions at MAXIFAX, she had imbibed that Center Street was the most common street name in the U.S. of A., so she was staking all of her chips that this thoroughfare had to run somewhere across the map of Merryweather.
“Oh,” chirped the Kelly Bag, “Center Street’s right over their,” and seizing her totem clutch, she shimmied off through the hunched-over hipster patrons.
With a chummy urgency, Bella whispered to both the Birkin Bag and the Swarovski, “You’d better go catch her.”These ladies made for the door without their handbags, proof of the potency of Bella’s powers of persuasion, but realizing that they were each missing a limb, they circled back through the sundry kombucha junkies to claim their high-end appendages with a flutter of apologies, then made a redoubled bee-line for the mythical 2525 Center Street.
That left just the Brahmin Bag.Bella looked at her.“Well?”
“Oh, that’s right,” the lady agreed and she up and left chanting the little litany, “Shop, shop, shop.”
