Case Notes: Miss Irina Hudd.

 

The vanity table in Mrs. Hubb's bedroom holds a season's worth of scalped tickets and other ephemera. Her husband lives in his car on alternate days to give her time to pull herself into reasonable shape. The son is off at college. But, there's a rumor about that his return will be delayed by an encounter with a shapeless object. No one is able to predict the color, but some go so far as to enlist an expert. This particular expert has certain things/qualities/events to live down if he is to stay active in the field. This time in their lives will be remembered for all that it isn't. If anyone else is so lucky, it's fair to say they're not inclined to spread the word far and wide. It's what keeps the peace in this era of latchkey psychofants.

I came in the middle of the night to help in some way. Everything was made clear in a text message the previous afternoon. After I arrived, I helped set up a special lamp in an outer room so we could tell if anything had been moved. Mrs. Hubb sat on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table and cried while she perused an industrial bulletin. It featured a telltale article about her late father, known to be a visionary under retroactive incubation. She was in no mood to not coöperate when I affixed copper tubes to her ankles. This would, I believed, enable her, once the current was withdrawn, to shield the microscopic dots and help embed a more productive relief system in the one place it might actually do some good. For all I know, she still lives with the certainty that no one will ever find out an inconvenient truth. But that, unfortunately, won't get us very far.

It's very important to know that I will save every picture I took, both before and after the operation. Once she became more physically pliable, she was attached, without her knowledge, to an Algonquin Modular Excision. When she first engraved her secret number on a piece of driftwood near the Sylvania Turnpike, I turned to her late brother for advice. He motioned for me to sit quietly with my hands placed 'just so'. In the interim, he would be called on to brief the reigning President of Carpenter's Union Local 3922 about an expected security breach at the Allentown, PA headquarters. I thought this was rather odd because I'd never known him to seek the limelight in this patently offensive manner. When his dinner arrived in a truck with Phalangist markings, I knew that my fate would have its way with anyone who refused to take advantage of people who were down on their luck. Further, I had a not-so-funny feeling that once my third child completed her college program, there would be nothing left to say to those who lived to see my downfall. In a matter of seconds, a paper forecast took center stage and my family and I were fully removed. Does this make you happy?

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