September 13

John Travolta is in your kitchen, propped in front of an open refrigerator with his face wrapped in damp dishtowels. You’ve got three fans blowing on him—two oscillators set on wooden chairs and a Super Tornado duct-taped on top of the fridge door breezing steadily across his face. You unwrap it to see a flattened nose, a glass eye skewed in its socket, his broad comic face sagging like a stroke victim.



You curse.



Rule number one: Don’t steal a wax-museum statue from people who can hurt you. Rule number two: Don’t transport it to your apartment in a beat-out Subaru in late summer when the mercury is pushing past 90 and the air conditioner is dead as dead. You were so close, a few feet, within inches, and now here you are: You alone with Travolta. Alone with a libido so gone that all the gods of myth and man can’t do a thing to resurrect it.

from R-72 by Michael Mazza

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