Free The Moment of Everything by Shelly King

taken out of his right ear, and he looked more like a runty bear cub than a cat. Usually, Grendel perched on top of the stacks and swatted at customer’s heads as they passed by. This was a rare ground appearance. I wondered if he always smelled this bad and if the stench just usually drifted upward, which might explain why the office space above the Dragonfly had been empty for two months. You can blame only so much on the recession. Grendel sauntered past me, carrying something in his mouth, and headed toward the open men’s room door.
    “I had that section just the way I wanted it,” Jason said. “She doesn’t have any experience with this. We haven’t trained her. What’s she doing messing with our stuff?”
    “Grendel’s here,” Hugo said. “Grendel smells like last year’s garbage. Grendel’s dropping a bird carcass on my foot. I’m in my Place of Peace. I’m in my Place of Peace.”
    “I quit!” Jason slammed the door shut. A moment later, I heard the bell over the front door ring and the commotion of Jason trying to maneuver his bike out of the store. The few customers left in the stacks all looked at me.
    “I don’t actually work here. I’m just helping.”
    I scurried back to the Romance section and sat on the floor, hiding from the scene up front. The thing about the Dragonfly, to pile onto its load of idiosyncrasies, was that there were only two places in the whole store where I got decent cell phone coverage, near the window in the chairs and in the very back, where I was now. So as soon as I sat down, my phone started to vibrate in my pocket, signaling an alert from an app I’d installed to track how many views the website got and how many times the Facebook and Twitter posts had been shared. When I saw the numbers, I nearly dropped the phone. Henry and Catherine had gone viral.

Chapter Four
Savage Hammerheads and Other Temptations
    I try to go on with my day, doing what is required of me, but I find myself here again and again, wondering where you are.
    —Henry
    “That’s fucking gold you’ve got there,” Dizzy said, pointing his spatula at me. “One hundred thousand views in twenty-four hours for a shitty little bookstore? Fucking gold.”
    Sitting at my breakfast bar, I yawned in delight as Dizzy stood at the stove and made us the fried bologna sandwiches he’d long ago perfected. Growing up, Dizzy and I would watch his mom, Miss Velda, as she made us these sandwiches—greasy, goopy glorious pokes in the eyeball to every fitness guru who ever insisted we should all give up carbs or examine our poop. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d fed them to us just to piss off Jane Fonda. For years we watched Miss Velda and memorized each step. She’d slather Duke’s mayonnaise onto Sunbeam white bread, sweeter than molasses. She’d press down on the bologna with her spatula when it domed up on the heat of the cast-iron skillet to make sure the center part had that nice scald on it just like the edges. She’d peel off a slice of American cheese and melt it over the bologna until it oozed like lava. Then she’d scoop it all onto the Sunbeam, and we were just a bag full of Lay’s potato chips and a dill pickle away from heaven.
    Dizzy and I carried on this tradition in our dorm’s basement kitchen at Carolina. Even the greatest of disappointments had the silver lining of fried bologna sandwiches. A lower-than-expected test grade, a broken heart, or even a bad weather forecast would become an excuse to further Dizzy’s birthright of the best fried bologna sandwiches in all creation. It was then he became an artist at Picasso levels. He’d slice the bologna himself into a thick disk that carpeted the bread even after shrinking up a bit on the skillet. Then he’d double up on the cheese, draping one square angled over the other so the corners fully covered the circle of bologna and left no rounded edges exposed. And after placing all of this on the bottom slice of bread, he