Free The Grief Team by David Collins Page A

have you on his show.” 
    “Fuck that, I get enough screen time already and that ass Wilson-Wilson is always available.  More people suck that pseudo-historian’s dick in a twenty-four hour period than a WildKid has fleas.”  Elias was now busy combing his long dark locks, displeased and frustrated that several perspiration-soaked ringlets were again bobbing out in stark perpendicular relief against the flushed skin of his forehead.  “Is there a hair dryer available?” 
    Ferria quickly scanned the small studio for the skinny make-up kid who had powdered the Mayor’s features. “Would you like me to ask for one?”
    The Mayor winced.  “Damn these ringlets! Schedule an appointment for me at Maria’s tomorrow. Make it early.”  
    Ferria smiled and nodded, making the note. Some days she had so little self-control. Jumping Elias’ bones right here in front of the technicians and security people? What would her parents say if she did something like that before she became a citizen? Still, Ferria wasn’t particularly concerned; she was only following what the textbook said, the one she got for her evening Sex Education course in the Academy at the Children’s Mall.  It warned that there would be wild, insane flashes of sexual desire as she neared citizenship age but that it was logical to assume that these flashes were designed by the body for preliminary use only—what Mayor Dickie called “priming the pump”—and were not logical opportunities meant to be acted upon.
    Dogs’breath , thought Ferria, the faculty at the Academy wouldn’t believe how many Stage Five virgins are currently losing their non-participatory status in these final days before Revelation Night. At least twenty classmates that she knew had already pressed the Disable icon on their Saf-T-Alarm anklets and had found a classmate willing to do the same. Something that I suppose I should do, she considered, just to go with the flow in case anybody’s noticing on behalf of the Revelation Night Committee. Those old lechers, every Stage Five’s worst nightmare…
    Elias smiled. He knew that Ferria was prey to the excitement of the hot, busy TV studios, especially as it happened to be Thursday Night and Countdown to Horror, the most popular show on TV, was happening live right behind that door over there. What was that Dickie had said…all that shit about TV brainwashed children and caused teenage gangs to re-enact the violence they saw…how it had just gotten worse and worse until Prime Minister Haardvar had sent in C.S.I.S., the spy network, and seized control of all telecommunications facilities in the country.
    Such a drastic action should have placed Canada’s gentle alliance with the Americans in great jeopardy—particularly as American-made shows ranged across all stations, Canadian-or-not—but, as it happened, Washington had turned loose the F.B.I. at the same time and thus, across the continent, station managers and their staffs and television stars were pulled off the air.  Inevitably there were a number of deaths as news-anchors fought for control of their news-anchor-desks and the subsequent carnage was broadcast live on each station until agents found the main fuse boxes and, one by one, gave them a big kiss each with a pound of Semtex 30/30 out of a shoulder launcher.  
    “It was the single, stupidest decision which two political morons ever connived together!” Mayor Dickie had written. (see endnote 6) “The President of the United States was politically somewhere to the far right of the White Aryan movement and our own Prime Minister Haardvar was a fuckin’ nutbar!  You’d see lobsters on cocaine picking lint out of my asshole if those two were capable of acting with a shred of logic between them…and calling off the dogs twelve hours later and blaming it on hackers tampering with the government ‘net was a fucking cowardly lie!”    
    It was true. Ferria loved the lights, the smells, the action, the