WHAT IT IS
They could disagree about anything. Jaden insisted the red fire hydrants flowed the slowest and it was the blue ones that gushed like volcanoes, while Jaclyn informed her partner it was the green ones that were slow and the orange dudes that meant business. They discussed this while watching a torrent of water beneath a wee little SMART car that had collided somehow with an orange hydrant and now sat atop the spewing water. The force of the water would lift the car slightly off the ground at random intervals, then a pressure change, and the car settled back to the ground. The car’s doing push-ups declared Jaden! More like pull-ups was Jaclyn’s response.
When the city maintenance crew arrived, the hydrant escapades ended and the two J’s cruised toward the rising sun to check out some biker activity their sergeant had asked them to keep an eye on. The Chaps favored a couple of bars in the French quarter but it was an abandoned landscaping garage that was the focus of police interest. The J’s first pass in front of the building saw no one on the property, so they decided to park the cruiser down the block and wait to see if anyone showed.
Jaden looked out her side window and saw a deserted building lot covered in weeds, coffee cups, broken glass and thousands of wildflowers. Her soul mate would love a bunch of these wild beauties, so she opened her door, found a thermos in the back seat that could double as a vase, and started picking.
They looked like two sleuths, tip-toeing from the scene of a crime, their hair messy, tangled and cascading over their grey faces. Attempts to sweep it from their eyes resulted in fingers getting entangled in the frizzy mess with quiet moans of frustration drifting across the lot. Jaden watched these two unkept souls for a couple of minutes then cleared her throat to get their attention. Margaret immediately collapsed, a startled Samantha tripped over Margaret and ended up on the ground beside her. “You ladies lost?”
WHAT IT IS NOT
One munk paced in his tiny cage twenty four hours a day, stopping only to devour a few nuts and sip some water. Another munk slept for twelve hours, then ate incessantly for the other twelve. The third munk devised a way to open his cage, crawl along a copper water pipe to an outside wall and peer through a tiny hole in the foam insulation to the forest outside. His view of the world was extremely limited, a couple of trees, some timothy grass, blue wild flowers and a small piece of ever changing sky.
The munks were on the edge of Algonquin Park, in an underground bunker built by INSECT and awaited a fate they were sure would be most unpleasant. INSECT’s chief biologist was laid up with a severe case of gastroenteritis, so an outside biologist was contracted to subject the munks to a battery of psychological tests, some routine torture techniques and finally, dissection of their bodies.
Security at the bunker was tight, with credential verification, identification and background checks, finger printing and even retinal scanning was performed to make sure the right person was allowed access to the bunker. In the end, Stacks McDonald, backed by Slim Clemons’ flawless forgeries, was led down a dark hallway and into the munks’ holding cell.
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WHAT IT IS/WHAT IT IS NOT 