Free Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler

loops and ears and then given as friendship tokens, romantic tokens and Nature Walk tokens, the God’s Eyes surveyed the whole camp within a few days of their debut. Kids would sneak away from swimming to raid the diminishing yarn reserves of the Shack. Missing kids would return as the gong rang, breathless from their excursions, grass stains on their untucked shirts, clutching exchanged tal- ismans of their lust, damp from their sweaty palms. The very act of unravelling yarn became foreplay for the pre-teens. Cyn gave me one as a joke after she mounted me in the changing room during lunchtime, the damp room swirling around us with the ghosts of who knows how many bashful boys hiding their circumcised erections behind the blue and white Camp Shalom towels, how many chlorinated orgasms achieved in the trembling privacy of the stalls, wiped off hairless chests with toilet paper, rinsed in the pool as soon as the protrusions sub- sided? God knows. They saw everything, things I couldn’t have seen myself, and they told me I must have been wrong. All summer long, blinking in the breezes, we were watched over by the handmade surveillance of God’s Eyes.
    ACT II, SCENE ONE

    A pre-curtain woodwind interlude establishes the three weeks between the first we know of Dr. Glass fucking his daugh- ter beneath the attic floor of Joseph’s borrowed room and the eye-piercing blaze when the footlights hit the dagger Mrs. Glass is holding. If the director blocks it carefully, the soprano should be able to catch the light at every angle of her arc, sweeping the audience in pure glare like something arriving from another planet.
    But it’s just a prop. After the first week of camp, instead of riding home with Cyn I had been walking over to the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts to finish off my incomplete in their library. Of course it was still early in the summer, and my box of books from Mather College still hadn’t arrived, so there really wasn’t much work for me to do, but when Mrs. Glass suggested it Cyn agreed so readily that I said O.K. Intellectually I knew that between working together and living together Cyn and I needed some time apart, but I didn’t want to. Still, the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts had a library which could at least give me an idea for the paper until my books arrived, and when I got bored I could stroll down to the Props Studio where Mrs. Glass made the necessary objects for the summer season. It was a fine way to spend my late afternoons, there in the crowded company of plastic ivy, plaster vases, sofas with trompe l’oeil velvet brushed onto them. Meanwhile, the good doctor would return to Byron Circle about the same time, his practice faltering after the ceramic bone disaster, and Cyn said she wanted to spend some quality time. Alone. With him. “Nice dagger,” I said, and Mrs. Glass turned and smiled at
    me. She put her finger on the tip of it and it bent droopily. The audience sighs in relief; it’s rubber.
    “How are you, Joseph?” she asked, taking her finger off the dagger so it bobbed like a freed penis. “How are the Shalomers? How is your paper going?”
    “The campers—Hello, Goodbye, Peace,” I said, sitting down behind a row of white wig heads. “The paper—Going, Going, Gone.”
    She turned down the radio to hear me better. Out of the speaker the summer’s biggest hit was revving up—“Bing Bing Bing.” The sound my heart makes when I see you babe. “You’re done with the paper?”
    “I haven’t started,” I said. “I call the postal people every morn- ing and they can’t help me.”
    “I know what that’s like,” Mrs. Glass said. She thrust the dagger to her own scarcely-sagging breast, took it away, thrust it again, gave a satisfied nod and put it in a box filled with daggers. “I called the clay people today for the umpteenth time and they just keep saying, ‘it’s on its way, it’s on its way.’ ” The clay people, apparently, talk in high