gey shuffle
down the stairs: step, drag.

On the ground-floor landing, someone's used aerosol glitter to silver the
sandbags that we use to soak up bullets randomly fired into our door. It's a
wonderful life.

I check myself out in the mirror. I'm skinny and haunted and stubbly and gamey.
Num.

There's a pair of size-nine Kodiaks in a puddle of melting slush and someone's
dainty wet sock-prints headed for the kitchen. Daisy Duke's home for the
holidays. Off to the kitchen for me.

And there she is, a vision of brave perseverance in the face of uncooperative
climate. She's five-six average; not-thin, not-fat average; eyes an average
hazel; tits, two; arms, two; legs, two; and skin the colour of Toronto's winter,
sun-deprived-white with a polluted grey tinge. My angel of mercy.

She leaps out of her chair and is under my arm supporting me before I know it.
"Maxes, hi," she says, drawing out the "hi" like an innuendo.

"Daisy Duke, as I live and breathe," I say, and she's got the same mix of sweat
and fun-smell coming off her hair as when she sat with me while I shouted and
raved about my knee for a week after coming to Tony the Tiger's.

She puts me down in her chair as gently as an air-traffic controller. She gives
my knee a look of professional displeasure, as though it were swollen and ugly
because it wanted to piss her off. "Lookin' down and out there, Maxes. Been to a
doctor yet?"

Tony the Tiger, sitting on the stove, head ducked under the exhaust hood, stuffs
his face with a caramel corn and snorts. "The boy won't go. I tell him to go,
but he won't go. What to do?"

I feel like I should be pissed at him for nagging me, but I can't work it up.
Dad's gone, taken away with all the other Process-heads on the mothaship, which
vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The riots started immediately. Process
HQ at Yonge and Bloor was magnificently torched, followed by the worldwide
franchises. Presumably, we'd been Judged, and found wanting. Only a matter of
time, now.

So I can't get pissed at Tony for playing fatherly. I kind of even like it.

And besides, now that hospitals are turf, I'm as likely to get kakked as cured,
especially when they find out that dear ole Dad was the bull-goose Process-head.
Thanks, Pop.

"That right? Won't go take your medicine, Maxes?" She can do this eye-twinkle
thing, turn it off and on at will, and when she does, it's like there's nothing
average about her at all.

"I'm too pr