Free The News of the World by Ron Carlson

festooned with fresh garlic once a month, and the man and the woman wore garlic in various forms sewn into a garment or on a string around the neck, or crushed into the hair. Some tribes were known to use a garlic mattress, which was rumored to have never failed. In many societies the smell of garlic was synonymous with fecundity.
EIGHT
    YOU lay yourself open to attack by a powerful creeping chagrin if you drive miles away from home one fine afternoon, as I did, guided only by your overwhelming desire to have children and by a lurid, illustrated half-page advertisement from the back pages of the scurrilous local shopper The Twilight Want Ads. Just the tabloid illustration mocked me: a crude wood block print featuring, or so it said, Mrs. Argyle, “Gypsy Wizardress, Alchemist, Seer, and Tax Advisor,” her face seemingly radiating small lightning rays of power and—what I took to be—understanding.
    So I set my mouth against the thorough feeling that I was a fool, and I followed the directions Mrs. Argyle had given me over the telephone, driving toward the village of Boughton, where I had never been.
    The interview that followed, in the woody turnout three point four miles from Boughton, with Mrs. Argyle, is still a mystery to me. Her rusty Ford van was there along with the two jade talismans hanging from the rearview mirror. I stood around for a while, trying to look innocent, and then finally I put two hundred dollars on the seat, as I’d been instructed in our call, took the necklaces, and left.
    Driving home was a different matter. Cruising the rural roads in Connecticut after twilight in the early summer, past farmers’ fields and the little roadhouses, their pink Miller Beer signs just beginning to glow in the new darkness, with two guaranteed jade talismans in my pocket, I began to swell with confidence and good cheer. I sang songs that I made up (with gestures) and grinned like an idiot. I never saw Mrs. Argyle at all. I motored toward Bigville, my mouth full of song, the jade glowing at my side.
    At garlic headquarters, my house, Story was waiting. I could see my sweet mayor and Ruth Wellner, my favorite county attorney, having Piels Light on the rocks with a twist in the living room. Piels beer is the only thing Story drinks, always on ice with a twist, and I had come to see the brown bottles with their cadmium orange labels as little symbols of pleasure and ease, perhaps celebration. But this time as I walked through the kitchen and saw the bottles standing on the counter, I don’t know, I was worried. Our normal life was amazing; why did I want to tamper with it? But then I thought: okay, if this is what I have to do to create another human being, to have a son or daughter with whom to play catch and Scrabble, and to show Picasso and Chagall, and to teach how to fish and to cook a good garlic sauce for spaghetti squash, someone to send to the fridge for another beer and who will chase his sister through the house with a pair of scissors and to lend the car keys to and to ground for two weeks for being late for some ridiculous curfew and to spend two hundred thousand dollars on and to leave all my stuff to, my collection of Monster Magazines, my hand-tied flies, my railroad watch, though it is broken, and someone to fake-right, go-left past for the hoop, and to paint a thousand versions of before I die, then okay, I’ll do it. I entered the living room.
    Ruth Wellner gave me the hardest ride with her eyeballs I’d ever had. “Hi, everybody!” I said. “How’s the township?”
    Story smiled at me, which is great about her. She always smiles at me at first. Then, of course, she said, “What’s going on, Dan?” I thought for a moment that she had read my mind or had seen the two lumps of jade in my pocket, but then she went on: “What have you done to the house?”
    â€œOh! Yeah.” I hadn’t thought of an answer, especially in front of