Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Okay, well, you know how you only use ten percent of your brain?” Chatham said.

“No, you don’t. That’s an urban myth,” replied Durant. “You use different parts at different times and for different things, but it pretty much all gets used. Otherwise it would have been selected out by evolution.”

“Well, yes,” Chatham conceded, “but if you could use the whole thing at once, instead of just parts…”

Durant sighed. “They have a name for that, you know. It’s called a grand mall seizure. People flop about like dying fish and bite off their own tongues before choking on them.”

“Are you going to be like this the whole time, or are you going to hear me out?” Chatham barked, exasperated.

“If you have any more pseudoscientific gibberish to spout, you might as well get it out of your system.” Durant shrugged. “But keep in mind that I’ll just be mentally undressing your secretary while refuting it.”

“You obviously aren’t all that interested in intelligence enhancement.”

“If you’d actually used it on yourself, I might be.”

A lot of it comes down to practice, and it was a rather poorly-kept secret that I had very little of it. This comes, like so many of my other horrible problems, from my misspent youth.

When I was in high school, adults would always marvel at how “mature” I was–studious, achievement-driven, never out late, never cutting classes. I was proud of it at the time, flashed that descriptor like a badge of rank, looked down on the “immatures” that flooded my class. In retrospect it seems like the most horrible excuse for a compliment anyone could conceive.

I should have been spending those years in the traditional way: sneaking beer, clumsy make-out sessions, rolling in the hay. Instead, I wasted it being “mature” and playing video games. Fooling around and sowing wild oats teach essential life skills and give room to practice them with willing experimental subjects. If romance were a subject, I’d qualify as developmentally disabled (first kiss at 18? first second base at 22?). By the time I came around to the need to practice these skills, I was such a rank amateur that no one my age was willing to be a subject.

So I kiss like a dead fish, I couldn’t get to second base at a tee-ball game, and I’m a virgin at the unseemly age of 24.

She was dressed, head-to-toe, in a richly embroidered abaya, which hid everything but her eyes (and even those were behind a veil). “That’s a fine…garment…you have there,” said Johns.

“Oh, this old thing?” Ms. Walker said. “It was a gift from an admirer in Trucial Oman many years ago.”

Johns made a thoughtful note on his pad. “I didn’t know you’d converted.”

“Oh, I haven’t, Mr. Johns,” Ms. Walker replied. “One should not go out of one’s way to call attention to oneself. That’s the maxim I’ve lived by since your grandfather was in diapers. I know that I can trust members of my household not to spread malicious rumors, gossip, or photographs. I do not, Mr. Johns, know the same of you. Hence the abaya.”

“Oh, I assure you, Ms. Walker, you’ve nothing to fear from me,” said Johns, flashing his most disarming smile.”

“Mr. Johns,” said Ms. Walker. “I’ve been on this earth for one hundred and two years, and I’ve heard that excuse more times than I care to remember. The last time I believed it, the very next day there was an atrocious picture of me next to Ellen Borden on the cover of the Times.”

“There was an…incident…once while I was making a microwave dinner. The resulting confluence of space and time flung me back into the midst of a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the 10th century BC. I was their king, and amassed the riches of an unspoiled new world before an errant lightning strike sent me home. I directed my subjects to bury their wealth at a given spot on my departure, and I leave now to reclaim it.”

Sherrie folded her arms. “A simple ‘none of your beeswax why I’m going to Peoria’ would have done, Rick.”

“Ah, but where’s the sport in that?” Rick deadpanned. “I prefer to build a towering artifice of sarcasm every possible opportunity. In addition to being personally edifying, it makes it all the less likely I’ll get asked inane questions in the future.”

“You mean the future that you’re off to the next time you heat up a burrito?”

“You of all people should know that burritos are not used to travel to a when, but rather a where,” said Rick. “Granted, that ‘where’ has a fifty-fifty chance of being Baja California or the handicap stall in the men’s room, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Misty Jennings had won every beauty pageant the town held, but she lacked the movie-star good looks (or the money to acquire movie-star good looks) to compete at the regional or state level. She therefore had to take the unprecedented step of inventing pageants to compete in, in order to maintain her status as a big fish in a little pond and to pad her resume for what she no doubt thought would be her triumphal entry to the regional scene.

Thus came about the Miss Highway Patrol Troop 117 Pageant, the Miss QuickStop Gas Pageant, the Miss City Parks and Recreation Pageant, and of course the Miss Haverton Oil and Gas Extraction Company Incorporated Pageant. There were always entrants enough to fill out the ranks from among the county’s starry-eyed young ladies, and Misty was if nothing else savvy about how she did things. Promotional considerations were often handled out of her own pocket; she usually only took home half of the advertised first prize by private agreement, and she was quick to trade “favors” for judges and sponsors to work practically pro bono.

That was the genesis of the Miss Dounton Street East Contest, which everyone expected would be much like the various iterations of a Misty Jennings coronation that had gone before.

They were wrong.