The interior of Simon’s car was blue vinyl. He ran his forefinger along the seat and dashboard. It slid across easily. He had custom designed the dials and numbers embedded in the dash. He opened the four windows. The air smelled of the passing rain. Heat rushed in to the car. The wave of heat struck the cold air-conditioned air and Simon felt the wall between them hold for a few seconds before breaking apart and the air turning from cold to warm and then hot. The cold air from the air conditioner felt very cool compared to the hot air pouring in from the open windows. Simon stared out the windshield. There was still much he needed to speak to Penelope about. He thought about the best way to approach it. He needed to talk with someone who would understand—someone who would not look at him like he was crazy when he told him what he had seen.

Andros, his dog, sat in the seat next to Simon. His tongue hung out and he was barking out the open window. “Yes, I know,” Simon said. “This is not getting us any closer to Penelope, or any closer to home.” Andros was small, brown, and skinny. He was old now, but when he had been young, he had been as fast as the wind, loving to run after anything that moved, as long as it did not decide to chase him. He did not enjoy being chased, or, more particularly, he did not like being caught.

Andros had mellowed as he grew older, and now preferred to sleep in the sun than run in the park. He now barked at moving objects instead of chasing after them. His barking always seemed to say, “I would chase and catch you if I wanted to.” At least those were the words Simon put in Andros’s mouth. Andros’s barks changed to whines. Simon reached over and fixed Andros’s ears, which had bent backwards, giving him the look of braided hair twirled into a bun. He always reminded Penelope of Princess Leia in Star Wars when he looked like that. “We’ll find her,” Simon said to his dog. “Don’t you worry.” Andros just stared at him with not a worry in his wet brown eyes.

“So where are you taking her?” Charles asked after opening his apartment door. Charles lived a few doors away from Penelope’s apartment. They had met one afternoon when Simon was waiting for Penelope to return home. He had been sitting by the pool reading the day’s paper when Charles struck up a conversation. Charles wrote for a local trashy newspaper.

The paper, known as The Houston Cycle, was a mix of local club, restaurant, and sex ads, littered infrequently with articles that occasionally had something to do with the local community. Most of the articles made fun of local politicians or characters. When your name appeared in the Houston Cycle, you knew you had made it. You also knew that the words would not be kind, and most likely fabricated to make you look bad. But it didn’t matter. Nobody took the newspaper seriously anymore, and the libel suits had stopped. It was tolerated because it had become such an unusual statement about the city. Charles had a lot to do with that statement. He had started the Cycle, and had guided it through its first years and later the many lawsuits that it became involved with. Simon loved to hear Charles tell the stories, fascinated with the makeup of the newspaper and how it had become such an important part of the community. Charles had resisted moving the newspaper onto the Internet, and having missed the revolution, the Houston Cycle had begun to move outside the mainstream. It still had a respectable subscription base, but the audience was shrinking and growing older.

Charles now did most of his work out of his apartment. He went into the office a few times a week to see how things were going. He only had a skeleton crew that still worked on the paper. He was not worried about its future anymore, content to allow it to grow stagnant and die away. He had thought of selling it, but nothing ever seemed right at the time.

Charles went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of beer. Simon grabbed one and took a sip, letting the cold liquid slide down his throat. Charles returned to sit by his computer, which was on the table with a dripping glass of iced tea. The apartment was messy as usual. Charles’s wife had left him some years back, and with her, Charles claimed, had gone any need to clean.

“Back to my hometown,” Simon said. “Fishs Eddy.”

Charles laughed. “I once wrote an article about Fishs Eddy,” Charles said. “We were looking for the name of a town where a carnival freak was born. In the article, the freak, I think his name was Underwater Ursine, a large bear of a man, spent his childhood eating the heads of fishes. Not surprisingly, he grew gills, and was able to live underwater for hours at a time. Everything was going well until he fell in love with a woman who had an unnatural fear of water. You can see where I’m going with this. He gave up his house near a lake, and moved into an apartment complex with his wife. Without wetting his gills, they dried up over time, and he was left only with scars on the side of his neck. He blamed his water-hating wife for losing his gills, and after many years of fighting and blaming, she left him for another man. With his gills dried up, he could not return to the carnival. His wife ended up leaving him for another carnival freak, and years later, when he saw the two of them in a carnival tent, he went home and drowned himself dead in his bathtub. You can see why we need a hometown for such a biography. We picked Fishs Eddy out of an atlas, although we stuck it in Nebraska so as not to harm any carnival freaks from your home town.”

“It’s a good thing you did,” Simon said. “I had a cousin who lived back in Fishs Eddy who did eat fish heads. I would be surprised if he had not grown gills.”

Charles gave an exaggerated sigh. “It needs more,” he said. “It can’t just be about fish heads and gills. That’s what my story was about. Now, if your cousin knew the irksome Ursine, now you’re starting to get into it. Perhaps it runs in the family. It’s a family of circus freaks who can do amazing things with the little they offer the world. You need to spice it up, add flavor, aliens, three breasted ladies, the normal stuff. The world itself is amazing. You have to take that amazing an bring it over the top, bring it to sensationalism. Bring it to the next step” Charles always spoke this way. He thought the world was one big story that was waiting to be made up. When something was not interesting, he felt the need to make it interesting, facts be damned. Simon respected Charles for this. He also felt inadequate when he attempted to play his games. He always felt he came up short. He was always being judged on how well his story idea would work within Charles’s newspaper.

“So why are you going home?” Charles asked. “Going to introduce Penelope to the family?”

“It’s complicated,” Simon said. “I thought you would be one of the few to understand.”

“Because I’m so quirky?” Charles asked, not really looking for a response. Charles was older than Simon. He wore his fifty three years easily, and felt comfortable around Simon and Penelope and their friends. He seemed to fit in to any age group. He enjoyed being the center of attention and telling stories from his newspaper or from the world around him. He was a worldly gentleman. He spoke with the same strong accent he had arrived from Scotland with. He had spent the first twenty years of his life there, and only left for America when he saved enough money. He decided on Texas because of its size. With an imagination as large as his, he needed somewhere that he could stretch it out and show the world what was available. Texas had offered him that opportunity, or at least that’s always how he told it. It was the advertisement from the seventies that had won him over: Everything is bigger in Texas. Indeed it was, he would remind people. As much now as it had been then.

Charles was tall and lanky, and his body had a slight bend to it. Looking at him from the front, you did not see the bend, but from the side, you could see his the C shape. His hair was gray and thick. It parted at the side and was cut unevenly around his elongated head. He wore a large gray mustache, which contained the same thick hair as on the top of his head. The mustache was a mixture of gray, black, and white hair. In his younger days, his hair had been a deep, thick black color, almost blue in the right light. With age, it settled down into what he refused to call “salt and pepper” colored. If he could not come up with a clever turn of phrase, then it’s a phrase he never used. He called his hair gray and left it at that. His eyes grew large when someone tried to become more specific.

“Because you may believe me,” Simon said by way of explanation. For all of his stories and exaggerations, what Charles did bring to the table was the ability to believe any story. Although he knew that most of what he published was rubbish, he was always on the lookout for true crazy stories. He was convinced they were out there, whether about aliens visiting the planet, or about people moving large stones with merely their thoughts. As much as he believed the world was huge and beautiful, he also believed there was much more out there. He made up stories to open people’s minds. His theory was that only when people’s minds were open enough could they accept the craziness that was the real world. He never stopped looking for that craziness, which was why Simon thought he might be interested in the voice he saw.

“It happened earlier tonight,” Simon said. “I was waiting for Penelope to visit or call on my porch, and I had just finished my third cigar. I walked down into my garden just when the thunderstorm started.”

“This was when the rain began falling?” Charles asked. While Charles was a great storyteller, he was not a great listener, at least not in the way others listened to his stories. He would cut to the chase of anyone else’s story, guiding them to the facts that he found important, instead of waiting for them to come out with it. In Simon’s case, this helped the story. Simon had a tendency to flounder around looking for a story. Charles guided him gently to the right path.

“Yes,” Simon continued. “The rain was falling and I was, well, I began to spin in the rain. It was hot and the spinning through the water off of my arms, like a whirlpool. It was quite invigorating, and when it started, it actually cooled me off a bit before the humidity returned. That’s not what’s important. One moment I was spinning in the rain, and the next I was shaking. My whole body was convulsing on the ground.”

“Oh my god,” Charles interrupted. “Were you hurt? What happened?”

“I guess I was fine, or at least I’m fine now. At the time, I had no idea what was happening. I was on the ground and I couldn’t move any part of me but every part of me was moving. I didn’t feel the movement, only saw it and it was strange. I felt as if I was locked in my body. It was not as scary as it sounded. I never had a seizure before—that’s what I think happened. I can’t know for sure, but it felt that way.

“I only had a few moments to worry about it, however. What happened next was the strange part.”

Word count: 2,089

Total words: 6,209

Words remaining: 53,791

This started as a bad day. I wrote late because of a morning headache—I either slept too much or not enough. It’s always difficult to tell. I’m writing these words after finishing only forty words for the day. I have no idea what should happen in my story. I’m spinning around describing things in the hopes that a description triggers more words.

I eventually moved beyond my bad start. I introduced another character. If my protagonist is going to do a quest, he’s going to need a gang of friends with him. You’ll be happy to know the writing is terrible. I remember terrible from my previous attempts, but some of today’s words...I’m doing you a favor by hiding them. Aren't consternations fun?