Free KooKooLand by Gloria Norris

didn’t matter. She had to fork over her dough to Jimmy, tell him what to bet, and sit in the car and wait just like me.
    Wait forever.
    Jimmy bopped me on the head with the Racing Form .
    â€œI’ll be right back,” he promised.
    I nodded like I believed him.
    He reached into the backseat and grabbed last week’s newspaper that he kept there to wrap up dead fish.
    â€œHere, read the funnies,” he said, tossing it onto my lap.
    â€œOh boy,” I said, trying to look grateful.
    He slammed the door shut, jogged over to the bookie joint, and rapped on the door. Three knocks, two knocks, three knocks. I saw the sliver of a man’s face.
    Open sesame and Jimmy vanished.
    I realized I had to pee.
    I picked up the paper to distract myself and turned straight to the comics. I called them comics but Jimmy called them funnies. I figured funnies was an old-timey word from when Jimmy was a kid. Back then he’d had to stick the funnies in the bottom of his shoes when he got a hole in the sole, and then walk to school in the snow. I pictured those newspapers becoming all wet and maybe a picture of Blondie and Dagwood fighting getting on the bottom of his feet. Like the newsprint was now getting all over my hot, sweaty hands.
    I finished the comics in a few minutes and then scanned the paper to see if there was any news about the Boston Strangler. There wasn’t a mention. He was still out there and the dumb cops couldn’t catch him ’cause they were too busy eating rum cakes that made their lard-asses lardier.
    I read everything in the paper and was down to checking out the ads. The Wa Toy restaurant was having a special on their pu pu platter. Chink chow, Jimmy called it, and wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Supposedly they hid dogs and cats in the food like that maniac from Blood Feast hid eyeballs in his Egyptian stew.
    I began to worry. What if some Chinese people came around the projects and tried to snatch our cat, Sylvester, for one of their pu pu platters? I told myself I better keep Sylvester on his leash from now on. And I better keep an eye out for slanty-eyed people. Then I closed the paper so I wouldn’t have to think about dead dogs and cats anymore.
    The intense heat in the car was making me sleepy. I imagined being baked alive like what nearly happened to the kids in my favorite fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel.” Those kids got dumped in the woods by their father and then a witch tried to roast them.
    I hung my head out the window and tried to catch a breeze from an approaching truck. It thundered past, a few inches from my schnozzola. I fell back into the car, my heart pounding. I pictured my head being severed from my body and rolling down the street until it got squashed by a bus. Maybe that was a better way to go than roasting. At least it was quick.
    I started singing about ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, but it made me too thirsty, so I stopped. I imagined crawling around in the desert with nothing to drink and dying that way.
    I imagined exploding from pee.
    Somehow, death was always popping into my head even though I didn’t want it there. Death was like a toothache that just kept throbbing away.
    Jimmy had first clued me in about death years before. We were up in Nova Scotia, visiting Grammy and Grampy. I was picking wildflowers. I called them powers ’cause I couldn’t say flowers yet.
    They’re bootiful, I cooed to Jimmy.
    Jimmy stared out to where the woods began, past where the wildflowers were. He looked sad about something. I tried to hand him a power.
    They’re beautiful, but they’re all gonna die, he said. That’s the lousy thing about life. Everything goes away. Everything dies. Even your mommy and me will die.
    I dropped my powers and started screaming. I wailed so loud Shirley came running out of the house.
    What happened? Shirley screeched.
    Nothing, Jimmy said. She’s crying over a big fat