Every story begins in the middle, ends too close to said middle, and describes not a jot of the real experience. When Bob is trying to kill Janet, where is her husband, Jerry? By all the dictates of convention, Jerry should run inside just in time to stop Janet from being horribly murdered. Or, conversely, he's having it off with his secretary -- who is, of course, Bob's wife. Or sister, or mother, or aunt ... and that's the poor sad reason Janet is soon going to be little more than two lines in the Metro section of a newspaper that was bought out last year, was never much good, and is dying faster than Janet.

*     *     *

Our local friendly (to hoteliers and dirty cops) journalist is hoping that Bob is black (life, maybe death). Or at least Latino (20 to 30, out in 12). That's a story. Or, if the sad sack of shit is white (8 to 12, out in 5) maybe he'll at least do something ritualistic or even Satanic. Or maybe, and said journo settles his sweaty ass further into the cheap office chair, Bob is short for Bobbie, Roberta, it's a “Lesbian Love and Lust,” “Leather and Lace L...,” L, L, L. There must be something good beginning with L.

Life's too short to worry about the journalist. He'll find the thesaurus, and in years to come he'll cover so many of these “domestic disturbance” cases that he'll retire at fifty-two when he creates a very popular betting line that correlates repeated domestic disturbance calls to subsequent murders. It's not a scientific relationship, he tells Howard Stern, and, somewhat later, Larry King, but it's close enough to be fun for journalists, cops, medics, and soon, everyone else. He's right. He's also divorced twice and can no longer pay for actual sex in his city. He will try in other cities. He will meet a woman, coincidentally named Janet, and try to convince her that his hands are the ones she would like to undo her bra at night. She’ll listen to him and think about how since she had her arm surgery she always chooses bras that snap in the front, and if that’s all he’s good for, then he isn’t good for much.

*     *     *

The original Janet -- who may be the same woman, but this story ends before we’ll find that out -- this Janet with less and less oxygen in her blood, has realized that if she does not do something akin to poking Bob's (white, 33, not married, right-handed, medium-penised, one of the last of the old-time soda jerks) eyes out, she might die. She does what she has to do.

*     *     *

While the jury deliberates over Janet, Bob breathes through a tube in the local hospital. He is awake two hours of each day. During those hours his muscles are worked by a physical therapist -- who does not know anything about Bob, except that Bob hates everyone and hopes to die rather than keep having to do these exercises. Bob has been tried and convicted in absentia for the attempted murder of Janet. Should he ever be able to walk, or even move his head, he will be carefully transferred to the federal prison system. He would still not be married, but he might be someone’s wife. Bob refuses (grimly, he thinks to himself, but fearfully would be much more accurate) to think about that and waits for the next needle to be pushed into the tube. He likes that one. It knocks him out.

*     *     *

In O’Leary’s Bar, on Beacon Street in Boston, the debate rages over which prison Bob will be sent to. Throughout the fall, Sandy’s position (last name, age, and gender withheld by request) has been that without male genitalia, Bob is no longer a man. On Sunday night, before the band came on, the person to Sandy’s left had argued that that definition would not stand up in a playground, never mind a court. Sandy asked him outside to discuss it further, as, each time a serious opponent appeared Sandy had done before. [This request may encourage the reader to consider Sandy as male. It should be kept in mind that on this Sunday evening, of the two people now outside, Sandy is the shorter, the one more redolent of self-applied scent, the more likely to do the laundry. You should realize that none of these identifying quirks mean anything.]

*     *     *

Janet is not convicted. Once the judge admits Bob’s tape of his and Janet’s night together into evidence the jury goes from expecting her to be fried (even though Massachusetts has ceased revenge killings in return for previous crimes) to exonerating her and wondering if they can award damages. The judge strikes down the jury’s multi-million dollar award, explaining that Janet will have to take Bob to court for a civil trial for that to happen. The jury are disappointed, and a little angry at Janet. Janet’s family and friends are haunted by attorneys for weeks on end.

*     *     *

Bob’s unwitting co-conspirator’s name was Arnold. He lived some miles from Bob, but they often fished together. He had seen Bob naked more than anyone else on the planet, although neither Bob nor Arnold ever talked about this, and both would have been horrified if the other had. Their success at fishing was limited by their tendency to talk for hours. Theirs was a friendship based on sentences with an infinite number of clauses.

*     *     *

Arnold had never met Janet, nor her sister, and was not married into the journalist’s family, either. He had met Bob at a gas station. They had both complained about the lack of window-washing fluid. They complained long enough that Mike, the 19-year-old attendant had filled the trash-can-cum-fluid-dispenser, breaking a 13-month streak of non-filling that had thrilled all the other attendants. Mike soon quit the job, bitter about his failure to ignore Arnold and Bob. He realized that if he listened to the muzak at the station and had to deal with customers any longer, he’d either kill someone or become just like Bob. And he hated Bob. Bob filled his gas tank every Tuesday and Friday. On the third Friday of every month he changed his oil. Mike had gone as far as paying off his shift boss so that he would never work on Tuesday and Friday. It killed his schedule, but he was happier. He could go to work, not looking forward to it, but no longer hating it. All that came back when Bob came in on a Saturday, met Arnold, and managed to make Mike refill the window-washing fluid. It made Mike so mad he couldn’t think.

*     *     *

Later, when he retired from his advertising business, Mike found he missed the gas station more than his office. Hardly any gas stations survived. The shift to electric had killed them, and Mike had happily done his bit to change the national infrastructure. The future is quiet, had been one of his lines. Too, You’re cleaning the air she breathes (above a picture of a very cute kid). His had been very hopeful slogans. They had taken him from local shops to margarine to cars and spacelines. He was closer to Bob there than he’d ever know. Neither would ever want to know.

*     *     *

That kid, the one in the ad, wasn’t Janet’s relation either. Not her long-lost child or a frozen embryo twin born long after her. She wasn’t even Bob’s relation.

Arnold moved to Boston while Bob was still in the hospital. Years later in bars and gas stations, queuing with the other slow-on-the-uptake drivers, he told people the girl was his nephew. “Which girl?” they’d ask.

Arnold was confused, he’d never really had a niece or nephew, he’d forgotten which was which. Nephew had that soft ‘f’ sound in the middle, it sounded feminine to him, so he’d say, “See her, on the side of the bus? That kid? That’s my nephew, Alis.”

He drank more, now that he didn’t fish. Maybe Mike was Arnold’s son. Maybe Arnold was just another married and divorced failing father figure. Maybe he was just in the sun a little too much. Drinking a little too much.

*     *     *

Bob hadn’t meant to kill her, Janet, so perhaps he was fortunate when she caught at him, clawed at him, tore at his face. He pushed her back, and who could say what he meant to do then?

If he had been stopped, he would have shaken his head (knowing from books and films that that is how the head is cleared), and said, “W’at? Wassat?” When another moment or two had passed and a disembodied voice asked Bob what he had been doing, what he’d meant to do, he would have been unable to answer.

However, he wasn’t interrupted. He was at home with a woman he had asked into his house to look it over. He had told her he wanted to sell it.

*     *     *

Janet had been in real estate for nineteen years. She owned her house and two small duplexes in the next town. She liked the renters in all but one of the units. They didn’t know she was the owner, and so when she did her weekly driveby, they never waved, never stopped her and asked her in for a coffee. None of her other tenants did, either. She’d been thinking of stopping, saying hello.

*     *     *

While she was recovering from Bob’s attack, Janet’s house was broken into. The burglars did not treat the house too badly: they rifled her papers, pulled pictures off walls while looking for her safe (it was in the kitchen, under a square of black linoleum), dumped her clothes out of the drawers. They did not eat a sandwich (leaving half on the table for DNA analysis), leave fingerprints, break the windows, or shit on the bed, as had happened to one of her coworkers.

Janet cried and cried when her friend Cheryl told her about the burglary. She cried easily now. She could no longer listen to 92.9, The Wave, once her favorite station. Every second song, tears would well up. Just thinking about some songs made her cry.

*     *     *

That thing about Bob and Arnold seeing each other naked, it sticks with you, makes you wonder. What can it mean? Did they meet at lonely lay-bys across the state? Perhaps they liked cards, but didn’t like for money to come between them. So maybe they played strip poker, or blackjack?

That person in the bar, Sandy, remember him? (Or her.) Let’s say him, then her, instead of them. Them is a bit odd when used for only one person. Sandy had another theory -- Sandy had so many ... but think of all the theories you don’t have to listen to -- relieved?

Sandy’s theory about Bob and Arnold went like this, “They’d been probed by aliens, you see,” Sandy said. There was a Red Sox game on, but they were losing 4-3 in the third inning. It was going to be a long game and people were willing to listen in the meantime. “It happens all the time,” Sandy said, and the bartender grinned. Forget the bartender, sorry he was brought up. We know him already. He’s slick, Irish, likes his stout and his whisky, dances like the moon over the heather. Won’t be here next year, but someone very like him will be.

“I had a friend who knew someone who got taken up, and not just once, maybe, um, at least a dozen times. See those guys probably don’t even remember. They just know something’s going on, but not what.”

But the Sox were doing better and no one was listening. “Probes,” said Sandy. “Aliens?” Bob and Arnold weren’t talking. Someone waved at Sandy, “Shh!”

*     *     *

Janet could hear someone running down the hospital corridor. She could imagine their heart, beating wildly, breathing in huge gulps, the hands of the security staff reaching for phones and guns -- did they have guns in hospitals? -- or stretched out just an inch behind the shirt of the runner. It would be a bright pink shirt, with ugly green parrots, and a silly phrase on it, she thought. “Go Bananas at Cabana's.”

*     *     *

The door to her private room burst open and a woman ran in. Janet struggled to sit up, but couldn’t.

The woman looked at her, said, “You’re not Andrew!” and ran out. Janet began to cry.

*     *     *

She cried because her husband, Jerry, had been screwing her sister, Melissa, while Bob had been lying on the floor wishing his genitals could be reattached.

Janet hadn’t known about Melissa and Jerry until she was in the hospital. They came to visit her together. Jerry sat on one side of her leg cast, out of arm’s reach. Melissa sat on the other side, stroking it. Janet knew immediately and pushed the morphine button. She didn’t want to cry in front of them, would rather drool in her sleep. Jerry moved in with Melissa so that no one was living in Janet’s house when it was burgled. Or maybe her nephew was? She couldn’t remember.

*     *     *

Bob had never been married. He figured that his twelve years at Joe’s Juke Joint had shown him the best and worst of marriage. He thought men fools. Except Arnold, who was married to a world-class woman, Lettie, who Bob had never seen naked, despite more than one attempt.

How Arnold and Bob saw each other naked was one of those things that Bob, now that he had no genitalia, never thought about.

Bob had managed to sweet-talk a number of women into his apartment, especially ten years ago, straight out of the army, muscled and cute -- his description -- and working for the moment at his dad’s friend’s diner. None of the women had stuck around for any length of time. Nona had lasted the longest, but she had left her buyer’s job at J.C. Penney’s and moved to Pennsylvania to get an MBA.

Bob thought about her on Valentine’s Day every year. He had once spent nearly $300 on dinner for her, the most he had ever spent. About a week’s salary for some steak, some wine. He thought he must have been pretty stupid, then.

*     *     *

Janet never knew that she was so strong. She’d thought she was going to black out, she’d been convinced that of all the dumb things to have happened in her thirty-eight years, this was the dumbest. Not even getting pregnant and dropping out of her women’s college seemed so dumb, now.

That had been bad, though. Her father had wanted to kill her. She’d known that then, and, precisely this instant, she knew why.

How complex he had turned out to be, her father. He was dead now. Two years ago -- was that all? The months went by so slowly. It took a death like that, Janet thought, scrabbling for something to hold onto, for time to slow down. Every year since she’d given her baby up for adoption had been faster and faster. She’d gone from Barnard back home to Virginia. Her hands found something to hold on to; something that if she had taken hold of earlier in the evening might have changed later events. But she had thought it was the very last thing on God’s green earth that she would ever touch. She’d gone from Virginia to her uncle in Wisconsin and lived in the spare room for six long, horrid months. Bob loosened his grip for a moment. His face was so twisted Janet thought of her baby, that almost-triangular head it had had when her aunt delivered it. But now Bob breathed out again, maybe it was a laugh, and Janet moved her hand downward quite fast, quite hard.

*     *     *

There were twelve men and women on the jury, or rather seven women and five men. Janet’s defense had tried to get more women, and Bob’s more men. All five men sat through the trial with their legs crossed. If it had not been for the video, they would have argued for the death penalty. Allan Swenson was the most vocal of the men. He’d worked himself into a state of grace, he thought -- apoplexy, the other’s thought -- over Janet. He knew exactly what should be done with her and her Fascist kind. Allan was happily (on his side) married (his wife’s position could only be remarked as “uncertain”). He knew a thing or two about women: the way they played men, the way they said one thing, and meant another. The way that intentions, he shook a finger at the other members of the jury, intentions were important! And what could Janet’s intentions have been when she went into Bob’s house? Allan laughed when someone pointed out that Janet was a Real Estate Agent. Everyone knew what she really wanted, said poor, simple Allan.

*     *     *

Hi-fi equipment had become Arnold’s specialty. After fifteen years at Circuit City he knew stereos. He’d therefore been at a loss to explain why his boss moved him to the video section. He feared he was on his way out. In audio he had stopped pushing the stuff in the weekly brochure, and started pushing what he knew was good. He thought his sell-through was still high enough to keep the boss happy, but the headscrews higher up probably didn’t want people to work it like that. He knew which way was better for who, but it was a long way down to looking for a new job and a studio apartment in a bad part of town, so Arnold sucked it up and started learning cameras.

*     *     *

Mac, the fat guy says, and the journalist spins on his chair and it makes a lot of noise, which he thinks is good because his name isn’t Mac, but his boss always calls him that.

Mac, I got a problem.

I’m on it, boss, the journalist says, with his hand in his pocket scratching his dick. He doesn’t know what his boss is talking about yet, but it’s good to be proactive.

Good. That cunt that tore the guy’s nutsack off . . . .

Yeah.

I want a story, page two, maybe a two-page splash. Nutsack Woman Walks Free. Watch your Nuts, Boys, She’s Loose.

Right. Photo?

Get Dave. Nah, use file, we’ve got enough. Now piss off.

Great. Just fucking great, thinks the journalist.

*     *     *

The judges in Janet’s and Bob’s cases meet once, about eight years after the trials wrapped up (so, what? Ten years after Janet went to look at Bob’s house?). Neither Bob nor Janet appealed their cases, although some men thought Bob should. Neither Bob nor Janet thought to thank the judges, but the judges were used to that. They met while golfing at Hilton Head in South Carolina. Neither knew about their connection, the one night of opposing expectations and passion gone sadly awry that had brought them together. They found each other to be good company. They don’t belong here in this part of the story: they did their job, listened to the arguments, and used precedent, the juries’ instructions, and their own thoughts and reflections on the law to pronounce the sentences. Yet they met. They managed not to have sex, which pleased their spouses, and in future years, they probably kept right on managing not to consummate their relationship. Pre-agenitalic Bob could have learned a thing or two from the judges.

*     *     *

Janet never enjoyed her sudden fame, and was angry with Bob for forcing it on her. She wanted to know, she told her friend Cheryl, why the dumb bastard hadn’t been happy jerking off at home. Why did he have to bring her into it? Cheryl had a story or two about men to tell Janet, but she didn’t rush her. She’d being getting a manicure with Janet before lunch every Monday for almost ten years. At one point Cheryl urged Janet to use her fame and start a company selling something or other; Cheryl had some ideas what that something could be. The next week Janet left a message and told Cheryl she didn’t need a manicure that week. Cheryl might have lived up to some stereotypes (died blonde, skinny, ready to party every Friday at 4.55 PM), but she wasn’t dumb in the way that almost every dumb cluck thought she was. She called Janet and apologized, said, I shouldn’t have said that. I know you didn’t want any of this and you want it behind you. I owe you a tall one. This was smart -- Janet secretly loved Tom Collinses. The next week they had a manicure and a pedicure.

*     *     *

Arnold had seen the ads on the Internet for the tiny cameras and thought they were pretty neat. He ordered half-a-dozen and set them up throughout his house. He wasn’t sure why he needed them, but he just sat and watched them for hours, waiting for something to happen. If he could have applied this behavior to fishing, he would have caught many more fish. He didn’t tell his wife, Lettie, about the cameras. She left him, before the trials, when she realized that the Bob on the news was the Bob that Arnold fished with. She knew about his cameras, and it took all of a minute for her to make the leap from Bob’s infamous self-incriminating videotape to Arnold’s fascination with cameras. “I never showed him the tapes of you. Or us,” Arnold said, as she packed. “I just showed him how to set them up.” Lettie made more than Arnold did. The house was in her name.

*     *     *

It’s the end of the story now, and there are a number of things we’re still not sure about. Sandy’s gender, for example. But we don’t care about that. Or Bob’s gender. One hundred people pulled from their beds at night, marched into cells, held for a month on bread and water, not allowed to sleep more than two hours at once, not allowed to read, kept apart -- these people would probably still argue that gender is important. It is important, and it seems obvious there are more than two, but it’s left to the daytime talk shows and the cartoon network to try and work it out. The newspapers and magazines don’t touch it. How could they sell adverts if their ABC1 readership was non-gender-defined? Then, also, who gave Bob’s tape to the jury? Bob didn’t have a housecleaner, or a good friend to watch his place while he spent days in therapy and learning how to use a catheter. Could it have been his mother? Or Mike? How would that have come about?

*     *     *

Janet never wanted to hear the name Bob again. She also hated the term Boston Marriage. She’d heard it a couple of times behind her back after she moved in with Cheryl. Cheryl didn’t mind, she had plenty of space. She’d always had roommates, she’d enjoyed it in college, all those years ago, she liked to say, over a tall drink in a bar with Janet. Janet still sold houses. She was good at it, she knew, and she was nosey, and she was still looking for that dream house she’d thought she’d find if she was a real estate agent and got first look at houses coming on the market. She worked out more often, and she knew Aikido now. She listened obsessively to the weather, and carried an umbrella on cloudy days. She never fed Cheryl’s cat, even when Cheryl visited her mother in Atlanta.

*     *     *

Mac!

The name’s--

Do I give a fuck? Get in here.

It’s probable that he went. At least for the next couple of years, until his betting line paid off, and he moved to Vegas. Later on, he tried writing a novel. But he couldn’t stop using the inverted pyramid. Everything he wrote moved from big to small.

Gavin J. Grant's stories have been published in SciFiction, Salon Fantastique, Strange Horizons, and the Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives. He runs Small Beer Press (www.lcrw.net) from Northampton, MA.