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I’ll get married, and then Dad can stop worrying about his only child, his little girl, floating around in the big bad world all by her lonesome.
    Too bad Keith is too worried about his stupid dogs to get the message.
    “Tomorrow morning … ten okay?” I say.
    “I’ll make pancakes!”
    Wow. Now the reflection in the mirror is really depressed. My dad’s practically punched Keith in the head with this opportunity, and yet … A spark glimmers momentarily that perhaps Keith is in on it, and he will be proposing. But I know that’s not even remotely possible because Keith can’t keep a secret to save his life. He almost had a heart attack last Christmas when he ordered me a boxed set of DVDs of some show I’d mentioned in passing. For him to hide an impending engagement, complete with a ring?
    Impossible.
    And do I really want him to propose? I spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about ways to remove the Yorkies from this apartment without getting arrested for animal cruelty. Therein lies my answer. If only I could adopt a brown bear or a cougar—now that would be a cool, multipurpose pet. If I could have a bear, I’d name her Bridget. We’d be the best of friends. And any time someone was a douche to me, I’d whisper in Bridget’s ear and she would eat the offending party. Or a cougar. Chloe the cougar, and I’d wrap a red bow around her neck and we’d walk down the street together and if anyone looked at me funny, she’d hiss and growl until they soiled themselves and we’d get the best tables at all the sidewalk cafés and I’d never again have to wait in line for my morning hazelnut latte because Chloe would use her long tail to swish all the other caffeine junkies aside. Move aside, bitches. Chloe’s in the house.
    And when she was a good girl, I could feed her a Yorkie. BAM! Problem solved.
    In between saving lives today, I will Google rules about keeping a cougar as a pet.
    Or I can just wait another few years and the reflection in this mirror will be all the cougar I need.

4: Dance Hall Days

4

Dance Hall Days
    They’ve replaced the air fresheners in the bathrooms with these fancier models that spit into the toilet bowl every time someone flushes. Make a poopy, instant flowers. Unfortunately, one has already malfunctioned and the entire underground bunker where my section of the dispatch center is located only gets air pumped in through vents. Vents with intake just down the wall from the bathroom. Which means the entire place reeks, compounding the headache already forming behind eyes baggy and tired from two hours of ragged pillow-free sleep on a lumpy, dog-smelling couch.
    Les is at his usual spot in the lunchroom, newspapers from local municipalities organized so that one doesn’t touch another but all six take up the entire surface of a singular table. I’ve tried to tell him he can use the Web to get his news, but he shut me down. Something about Big Brother and how the digital era will be the end of humanity, that the reengineered dinosaurs the government has in hiding will roam the planet again soon and then we’ll wish we had more things written down on paper or better yet, in stone like the Sumerians did with the stylus and clay tablets. “Those have lasted for six millennium. Your Internet? Ha. Dino food.”
    I still haven’t made the connection between the World Wide Web and dinosaurs, but apparently, it’s there. For those of advanced intellect. So, in other words, not me.
    He looks over the smudged lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses, pausing as he thumbs through the pages of his Black Book of Death.
    “A little light reading, Les?” I ask.
    “Postmortem this morning,” he sneers. “Expect a memo on your desk before day’s end.” A memo means retraining in some area where you suck. I’ve had three memos since I got off probation. Shit, one more memo means I have to sit with a trainer again. Next step is a dock in pay, followed by a union review, and possible