Of course, a day after Wal-Mart ate my novel I got it back. I'd gone to Customer Service, described the notebook, and left my phone number. The next day a rather cautious voice called to say they had a notebook--"something to do with, uh, Evidence of a Lost City?" "That's it," I said. Someone had turned it in. So my pages of notes and typed out pages are back.
A couple days later, my cat Mini, who had been with me nearly 15 years, vanished. That morning she had curled against me, as I set out her food, rather more insistently than usual. I spent a little extra time petting her. I never saw her again. How is that possible? She never left the back yard. Had she crawled off somewhere to die? I searched through all the area, in my underground room, in my piles of spare lumber. She wasnt there. There has been no sign of her since.
A couple days after that, at the cafe, my fast laptop computer suddenly died. I took it to the shop. The motherboard is kaput, they told me. I cant afford to replace it. I've fired up my old Pentium 4 desktop and am using that for my Evidence movie any my websites. But it is not nearly as swift, as capable, as my laptop was.
So what does all this mean? If this were a dream--if these events were nightmares--what would they signify? Perhaps Wal-Mart has indeed swallowed my novel, plus my cat and my computer, and what has been regurgitated are no more than dregs....
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6 years ago
