Free Created By by Richard Matheson

gently on the forehead.
    The facts of pain. The unnegotiable truth of hurt. He lost track of it sometimes. Then, some inconsequential asterisk on the reality paragraph would remind him. Maybe it was passing a motorcycle accident and seeing a red form pried off chain-link by cops in bloody uniforms.
    Or some horrible item in the news that forced you to read it twice, despite its cruelty, its impossibility. The human race could get very real, very fast. Sometimes Alan thought working in television could make you forget where the lines of reality started and ended. Where you came from.
    Where you didn’t want to go.
    He’d been home an hour when he and Bart wandered in from the deck, hungry. It was a bit after ten and the two sat on the kitchen floor, sharing a bowl of pestotortellini Alan warmed in the microwave. Bart dug a gourmand muzzle into his personalized bowl, tongue a single, pink chopstick.
    He stared up at Alan with moody brown eyes and Alan nodded. “Okay. I hear you.” He stood, grabbed a Kirin from the fridge, and poured half in Bart’s bowl, the rest in his own glass.
    “Gotta check my messages, bud. I’ll ask if anybody called you. Okay?”
    It was okay with Bart.
    Alan hit the Panasonic autodialer and the little Disney-flea-beeps sang a three-second overture. He stuck it on speakerphone and settled in on the floor with Bart, cross-legged.
    “Hello, Mr. White’s residence? May I help you?” It was a new voice. A little bored, a little interested. Intelligent. Like just maybe it knew what the hell was coming down.
    “Yeah, hello … this is Mr. White. Uh … anybody, you know …” The Kirin was scraping paint off his skull.
    “Call?”
    “Call. Right.” He was exhausted. Even Bart sensed it, wagging a counselor’s tail.
    “I’ll check.” He heard paper shifting, as if she was making an origami crow. “By the way, Mr. White. I just wanted to say hi. My name is Kimmy.”
    Kimmy.
It’s what people named their mice.
    “Yeah, hi. How’re you doin’?”
    “Well, it’s my first night. But pretty good considering. Mind if I ask you kind of a personal question?”
    He sipped more beer, felt things scaling his stomach walls. “Depends …”
    “Well, if I’m not mistaken, you did that sitcom ‘Stacked Plates’ couple of seasons ago, didn’t you?” She cleared her throat. “Those waitresses with the big tits?”
    Yeah, that was me, he thought.
    “Don’t remember.” His head felt crooked.
    “Oh, you’d remember something like that. My sister says it was probably just displaced anger toward women. She’s sort of a gender analyst. But not a dog or a lesbian or anything. But I thought the show was funny. You were producer or something?”
    Yeah.
    “No … listen, my messages?”
    “Right. Well, let’s see … Jordan called at eight-fifteen. Said the network was showing signs of budging but not to count on anything. He’ll call you in the morning. Wow. Sounds provocative.”
    Alan was starting to find her mildly irritating.
    “That it?”
    “Hold on … I’m getting there. Your business manager Ed called at seven-forty. A bunch of foreign-run residuals came in. Said to call him in the morning. Gonna be a busy morning, I guess, huh?”
    “Yeah. Anything else?”
    “Your mechanic called, said to bring the Porsche in on Monday. He’s booked through the week. Summer. Whole world is overheating.”
    Thank you, Carl Sagan.
    “And a last one from Erica at ten-ten. Said just to say she was thinking about you. Call her back no matter how late. Sounds like a sweet person.”
    Alan said nothing, staring at his foot, half-asleep.
    “Is she?”
    “Sorry?” He was getting drunk.
    “A sweet person. Is Erica a sweet person?”
    Ask her three ex-husbands, thought Alan. One tried to shoot her, one tried to destroy her life, one burrowed into Scientology and became obsessed with John Travolta and hidden meanings in the meaningless. She was a nice girl who seemed to trigger