CHAPTER 1

‘I might get the fingers to start turning flips and the language will spill
like some 5 gallon box of wine’

Excerpt from ‘Ugly People’ by Shane Helnsley

It’s not as if she had anything better to do for the next month of her life — just writing a bunch of redundant articles and reviews on the local music scene in St. Louis. It wasn’t that she hated her job at ‘Room’, a small, alternative entertainment paper, but it reallyhad become tedious. Her nights would typically be spent attending shows, which never left her any time to finish her current novel. Finish... that was funny. She had never gotten past jotting down a few notes long hand in a cheap pharmacy notebook. It was just an idea in its most embryonic stages. She knew, however, that if she had found the time, she would never get around to submitting it in anywhere, anyway. ‘Too many anys,’ she concluded.

Then there was the perpetual hangover. A thick skulled feeling that she wasn’t altogether certain was caused by the loud music every damn night, or the drinking she felt she needed to participate in to tolerate it. Just an occupational hazard, she supposed, while she would continue to pound them back.

Regardless, she had accepted this latest assignment and here she sat, in the back of a taxi cab headed for Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. She was so preoccupied with dreading the trip that she barely noticed when the car pulled up to the front entrance. She paid the unkempt and rather unsavory taxi driver and grabbed her laptop and bag off the seat. “Excuse me, Sir. What time is it?”

“Mmmeahey forhee fi.”

“Pardon?” she asked, but the car squealed away before she had a chance to hear him repeat his answer. She wasn’t even given the chance to close the car door properly. She reacted by shooting him the finger and hoping that he saw it in his rear view. “Asshole!” she mumbled under her breath.

She had forgotten her watch in her rush to get out of the apartment on time, but forgave herself for allowing her impending terror to steal her organizational skills away from her. She was positive that her loss of wits was only temporary and the result of a mild phobic anxiety toward flying.Mild — that was the understatement of the week. She was already two Dramamines into the game and her head felt like she was witnessing the world through a snug fitting sandwich bag.

Her flight was at five after nine in the AM and she had been warned to get to the airport at least one hour beforehand, preferably two. The largest of the clocks on the wall in the airport read eight fifty, meaning that the cabby’s “Mmmeahey forhee fi,” meant eight forty-five. She hurried at full gallop through the airport trying desperately to get a good hold of her luggage, but the bags kept slipping off her shoulder.

She reached the count