Free A Curious Affair by Melanie Jackson

nodding at the bicycle basket lashed to her walker. She had decorated it herself with a mix of silk and plastic flowers recovered from trash cans and the Dumpster behind the Best of Times thrift shop. Pinky, so called because ofher love of the color, was wearing a hot pink and lime satin jogging suit with high-top sneakers that had once been white but were now rusty brown. The bright colors were a bit lurid but I had to smile anyway. Pinky’s obvious happiness demanded it. She has fairly advanced dementia, but rather than succumbing to the usual fear and anger that afflicts its victims, Pinky’s mental deterioration has left her in a state of almost perpetual joyfulness. She probably belonged in a home for the permanently befuddled, but her kids refused to confine her or curtail her wandering. In any other place this would have been dangerous, but our town had sort of made her into a mascot, and people were generally good about looking out for her.
    Pinky thought—God only knows why, perhaps because she once caught me talking to a cat hidden up in a tree—that I was a friendly alien visiting from another world, and she was waiting patiently for the day when my spaceship arrived so that she could go for an intergalactic outing. I was—sort of—sorry that I didn’t have a spaceship for her. Talking to aliens was at least something people had heard of around here, where there are frequent UFO sightings. Witness the calls to the sheriff’s office the night before and Tyler’s laid-back reaction to them.
    Pinky had also been a friend of Irv’s. I wondered briefly if I should tell her what had happened to him.
    “The sun is out. I can see everything,” she said, beaming happily.
    “The sun is out, but I’m still in the dark,” I muttered, trying to match her smile but failing. Those muscles had atrophied. I also realized how much I missed the days of emotional equilibrium when the universe made sense, when I knew exactly what could and could not be. I needed to find that again if I was ever to know peace of mind. And if that meant that cats actually could talkto me…well then, so be it. There were more things in heaven and earth and all that. But I had to know if cats actually were talking to me, or if I was—well, if I was like Pinky.
    “Have you seen Irv?” she asked, as though guessing the direction of my thoughts. “I haven’t talked to him in a week.” With Pinky everything was a week—last Christmas, next Memorial Day, even her fourth birthday.
    “Not today,” I said, after deciding not to tell her about Irv being dead. It wasn’t my job to spread the unhappy news when clearly the sheriff preferred to keep it quiet, and I wouldn’t have volunteered anyway. I have learned firsthand that grief actually steals oxygen from the body. Little by little, it deflates those who are stricken with it, sucking the life right out of them. Pinky would probably forget the unhappy news almost immediately. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t, and I wasn’t going to be the one who ruined Pinky’s sunny day.
    A pickup truck rumbled by, the tarmac shivering from both the vibration of the overpowered engine and the rap music pouring from its stereo. Blend It’s slate shuddered for a moment and then fell over in a sludge puddle. This was the downside to having a highway pass right through town.
    I picked the slate up and then sighed. The sign was smudged and dripping now, but I didn’t have the time or inclination to fix it—though I wanted very much to jerk the driver out of his vehicle and dump him in the same puddle. I settled for flipping him the bird. I don’t like that the gesture comes so naturally to me. Rage was one of the reasons Cal and I decided to move. I was afraid that my middle finger was going to get stuck in an upthrust position if we stayed in the Bay Area. As it is, the muscles are still far too developed in the middle finger of my left hand.
    Waving good-bye to a puzzled Pinky, I started back up the