The sun, the silence, the sound of the little fountain, the warm water in the pool and the quiet resort all so relaxing. The two women accompanying me, my mother and she, made my long weekend feel safe and peaceful. The three of us looked so much like each other, our slim arms and shoulders, the curve we have in our lower back, the color of our skin and the tone of our voices.  I was glad they could talk all day and I could read and read and laugh out loud or enjoy the hot spring pool in silence.

Darren had proved himself capable, though he’d only been hired as bar-back two weeks prior.  He had a grace and speed about him.  He had a knack for quick-cut conversations, and for queuing the music that needed to be played.  Jessica trusted him.

When Jessica arrived a half hour after Darren opened, she was surprised to find none of the mixers restocked, and dirty glasses still stacked, unwashed.  The Home Shopping Network blared from the TVs instead of the ballgame or a retro movie.

“Jessica,” said Darren.  Not his usual grin and bow.  “Look at this.”

A dozen voices hummed rhythmically in the back of her head as she hopped down the stone steps and walked off the quad.  A men’s chorus, a tune she had heard a long time ago, as a child … a memory fragment.  Her father’s study, smelling of pipe smoke, as he handled his old books with more care than he ever used for people.   She’d heard the song in there.

It was a pleasing memory, it made her smile, but it warned of danger.   The song was a warning.

The moon shone full into the window of stuntman Roger Tully’s movie set trailer. Roger steeped out of the small bathroom and directly into a pile of empty beer bottles. They clattered and then rolled across the floor. “Crap.” He smacking his lips together, wishing he had some water to drink, suspecting tomorrow’s hangover would be painful. Roger, reaching up to pull the blind closed mumbled, “Three months stuck in this hick Texas town, and we’re still not done shooting this movie.”

Ten of the rabbits are going to die, Dr. Burnham told me: and I’m going to kill them.

They stare up at me from small steel cages, wrinkling their noses and hopping in a way that might be nervous, as I prepare a syringe filled with a cancer-causing cocktail.

The solution is green, the color of radiation and toxic waste in comic books.

These ten rabbits have to die, or no one will accept the results of Dr. Burnham’s experiment, no matter how successful it is.

I was warned this day would come: you can’t be a PhD in biology here and not kill things.

I steal.  You would never believe it, to look at me.  I am a carbon copy stockbroker-belt-stay-at-home-wife.  I live in a house that does not have a number because in our neighborhood the houses have names instead of numbers.   I play golf with an enviable handicap and win tennis matches easily.  I lunch.  I also steal.

A solo sailor is one thing. A solo flyer is one thing. People get used to the idea that a girl in her mid-teens can face air or water or wind on her own. They don’t trust her to face people. Not without being overborne in some way or other. A girl needs a protector on land. That’s what they tell her, sometimes they’re right.

“The earworms are the worst part,” she was saying.

Ivan looked up from his beer.  She was staring at him with a nervous half-smile, her eyes wide black holes in the dim of the bar.  Her fingers interlocked around a glass of cranberry juice that she still hadn’t brought to her lips.  “What?” he asked.

The suicide machine was created as a mobile unit, an in-home service available with just a phone call or an online order.  It rolled on treads, and features many attachments that get the job done.  Pincers, hoses, retractable lengths of rope, needles, and bludgeons come out of the stout body of the machine when summoned.  It was a machine designed for the utmost practicality, which makes what happened to it all the more surprising.

Every night, around four in the morning, on the rue Benoit Bunico in Nice, there is a shouting match between a man and a woman and though they are not always the same man and woman the shouting match always ends with a gunshot. The man is the one clapping and laughing and his voice is much stronger, but the woman shouts more and it is the shrill pitch of her voice that first invades the minds of the two foreigners, a husband and wife, sleeping four stories above the street.