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dread with him the entire day at school, and for some unknown reason he fiddled with the English penny and spun it on his desk innumerable times until the school bus came. Only later that evening did Wil realize that instinctively, he’d known his heart was emptying of all its joy. It became clear the moment the school bus turned the corner on his street and he saw the cop cars outside on his driveway.
    *   *   *
    W IL ENTERED his office in much the same mood as he’d left it. Thoughts of that terrible day long ago always sent him back to a dark and empty place, and this morning was no exception. The police had come to inform his dad that Melinda Morgan was tragically atomized during an experiment involving 17 trillion megawatts that had reversed the Earth’s polarity for a period of almost two nanoseconds. No trace of a body was ever found, such was the intensity of the explosion at the laboratory. Since that fateful day, Dad had never forgiven himself. Neither had he forgiven Mom for leaving him alone, nor the entire universe for taking away the one person he had ever truly loved, and whom he now needed more than ever before.
    Wil’s junky old answering machine blinked an insistent red. The contents of his desk and most of his shelves had been disturbed over the course of the weekend. His stapler had vibrated all the way across his desk until it was touching the pencil sharpener, and three of his pencils had fallen on the floor altogether. Wil’s little air freshener had left a trail in the dust as it had magically wandered from one side of a shelf to the other since the last time he’d seen it on the previous Friday. Wil growled; he knew this was the work of no ghostly agency. Far from it: this constant shifting of his office contents had a very simple, terrestrial explanation. Sighing heavily, he picked up the stack of letters that Mr. Whatley had thrust through his mail slot over the weekend, and he jettisoned the entire pile into the trash. He knew he’d fetch them out a little later in the day but for the moment it felt good to toss all of his overdue bills and pretend he had the power to do so.
    Propped up against the wall stood a moth-eaten package—roughly fifty inches long—that represented an ongoing battle of wills between Wil Morgan, the universe in general, and corporate America in particular. It contained an unwanted item that Wil had neither ordered nor even considered ordering, but that had been shipped to his work address on multiple occasions nonetheless: the Marcus James Air-Max 2000 golf club. On the first occasion it had arrived, Wil had duly shipped the driver back to its manufacturer and thought little more of it. The package had subsequently been reshipped to Wil’s office a total of seventeen times before he’d succumbed to the stress and made a phone call to the Air-Max 2000’s corporate office. Arrangements had been made with the help of yet another indifferent sales associate—presumably, an ex-employee of Mug O’ Joe’s—and the item had been returned for the eighteenth time. However, this had the effect of generating an alarming number of increasingly threatening bills, statements, and notices from collection agencies seeking the total cost of the driver, plus shipping, handling, interest, and apparently a subscription to the entire Marcus James Gleemodent toothpaste and clothing catalogue. Within days, the package had mysteriously reappeared just inside his door, thanks no doubt to the ever-diligent Mr. Whatley. And so for the last two years, Wil had held on to the item, still inside its crumbling packaging. In the meantime, the product had been redesigned and reintroduced as the “new and improved” (and slightly more expensive) Air-Max 3000. These days, Wil tended to add the occasional demand letters for the club’s purchase price to his regular discard pile. The only loser in this situation was the