Liam Perrin

“Do you know what bothers me the most about this?”

He did not. There were a great many things that bothered her. And what bothered her the most about any one of them at any given moment depended almost entirely upon, as far as he could tell, the weather. And since there were no windows here to look through nor doors to open nor radio to listen to that would tell him the weather, and since admitting that he did not know what she was thinking would set a match to the dry-wood scaffolding so recently erected around their teetering relationship, there was nothing else to do but guess.

“The enormous, bloodstained, serrated pincers,” he said.

She frowned.

“That was the last one,” she said. Her lip quivered.

He stooped down and spoke softly. “Balderdash,” he said.

She frowned and raised her chin, looking him in the eye. “That was the last one, and you took it.”

With her hand on her hip and her accusing finger she looked so much like a cartoon of a girl that he could barely keep from laughing. In fact he couldn’t, and when a giggle escaped she gasped, punched him in the chest, and stomped up the gangplank.

He straightened himself, inverted the snowglobe, and held it aloft to sparkle in the sun. A flurry of artificial snow engulfed the miniature city within. After a moment he sighed, pocketed the globe and, turning his back on the chasm where New York had been, followed after her.