a stunned pause, and then Nancy Kipling began to scream even louder than her daughter ever had. Paul Kipling collapsed to his knees, slapping his own face and shouting.
“She was going to be a gymnast! She was going to bring home the gold in 2025!”
In Starbucks, a brawl had broken out. A pack of teenagers in Juicy Couture were dragging the terrified barista over the counter and clawing her to pieces. At the Carolina Sports Bar a final, terrible bout of coughing seized Carl Willers, and he felt something heavy traveling through his sinuses. His climactic cough was a loud, wet yawp and his brain flew out of his mouth and landed on the table. He looked down at it and screamed. His brain opened two eyes, looked up at him, and it began to scream, too.
A pack of stuffed animals broke free of Mindworks, and chased down a fleeing mega-family on their way to Orlando. They managed to separate the two weakest children from the herd, and backed them into a corner near gate C13, incongruous growls coming from their plush throats. Steve and Reuben Marsh were window shopping the Duty Free store but when they saw the chaos breaking out they decided to run. Steve reached for his rolling bag but couldn’t feel the handle. He looked down, confused, only to find that his bag had bitten cleanly through his wrist with its zippered mouth and was now chewing happily. It swallowed, and lurched towards him, hungry for more. He stumbled backwards trying to get away.
“Reuben!” he screamed as he went down in a pile of rolling bags, all of them hungry, all of them slavering from their zippers.
“Steve!” Reuben cried, trying to reach his lover. Instead he found himself trampled beneath the thundering hooves of three Arabian stallions that had broken through Security and were galloping down the concourse.
Passengers scattered and screamed. Massage chairs in Brookstone began throwing themselves around the store like epileptic linebackers, shattering shelves of nose hair trimmers and ergonomic neck pillows. A nine-foot-tall golem assembled itself out of melted cheese and lumbered out of Sbarro’s and onto the concourse, crushing screaming passengers with its heavy, greasy feet. And still the man in the navy blue suit sat in the Carolina Sports Bar, oblivious to the surreal chaos around him, scribbling furiously on his paper napkins.
“Proud of yourself?” a voice said, dripping with effete disdain.
The man looked up. A beautiful, glowing person with the androgynous good looks of mid-career David Bowie was hovering in mid-air. The hovering man was wearing an impeccable white suit and he seemed peevish. The man in the rumpled navy blue suit looked around him at the bloody chaos breaking free on Concourse C and shrugged.
“My mind must have wandered,” he said. “Are you guys here to clean up?”
“The Heavenly Host is not your personal housekeeping service,” the floating, glowing man said.
“Right, right,” the seated man said, starting to stand up. “I was just working on some stuff and got distracted. It’s not a big deal.”
“Where are you going,” the glowy man said. “I’m not finished with you.”
“I really don’t feel like being lectured right now by one of God’s little chore boys,” the man said.
Up and down the Concourse, more glowing men descended through the ceiling. Passengers fell asleep and slumped to the carpet where they landed. The glowing men pulled apart the cheese golem, reattached limbs, restored life, repaired damage, reached into snarling, animate suitcases and barking stuffed animals and snuffed out their tiny faux-lives.
“Here,” the man in the navy blue suit said. “Pass this along to your boss. I forgot to send him one.”
He handed a piece of printer paper to the glowing man, who pinched it between two fingers like a dirty diaper.
It read:
We’ve moved!
The Offices of M. Satan and Co.
Have Moved to
The Fifth Circle of Hell
phone: 555-555-1010
fax: 555-555-1012
email: [email protected]
“Again?” the angel said.
“We’re down with the irascible and the sullen now,” Satan said.
“And still using Hotmail,” the angel sniffed. “You don’t even have your own servers yet?”
“You tell me how we can pay for them and I’ll get right on it.”
“It’s embarrassing. Doing business in such a slipshod manner reflects badly on those of us who remain in Heaven.”
“We take in over a thousand times the number of souls we did five hundred years ago, but our budget’s still the same size. I’m sorry we’re not the cash cow Heaven is.”
“I’m crying tiny teardrops for you,” the angel said. “Boo hoo hoo.”
“Just give that to your