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three-dimensional, which they are. Then we’re going to paint faces on the beans, different expressions but especially smiling, and draw legs and arms on the paper around the beans. Hands and feet too if you like. Shirts and ties and jobs and bills, fill out the lives of your bean people with the richness of your imaginations. You can make them into fish, cats, dogs, birds, bugs, whatever. You can make them skate, ski, crawl, fly, any G-rated thing at all, just by drawing what their limbs are doing. But before we begin, let’s pass the big sack of beans around, careful not to spill, and each take a turn reaching a hand in deep. Aren’t the beans cool and smooth? They almost feel wet, don’t they? This is one of those shortcuts to pleasure, kids, sticking your hand deep in some beans. We don’t ask why it’s so good, we just be thankful.

COMPLAINT
    Getting stuck nodding while Chef Grogg holds forth makes my mouth feel all, what, like full of rocks and slobbering. Could he not talk to us as a rule?

ROY
    I’ve got no peroxide for that hurt. If he doesn’t love you back, girlfriend: a story.
    Roy, a baby, was named for a real man, cowboy Rogers. But all Roy did was bathe horses in a swimming pool. He stared out on the delta and beyond, to his sad soul.
    A director one day passed him. “You have become a man now!” the director whispered in surprise.
    “But I have no money,” Roy said.
    That day, in an agent’s office: “I have your man.”
    “Nobody wants a cowboy star,” the agent mentioned.
    Roy got on the horse. “Something in mind?” He had the look all right.
    At his film, a non-white man gave him his first crack of cocaine and Roy was never the same. In his mind, he bathed horses of the rainbow. His Mom forgave him for forgetting her address, watching his reruns and happily singing his song out and proud. Roy’s dad said sorry for leaving.
    Roy got dry. Roy went to schools and told his Tale of Caution. Always, when he told them, children laughed but obeyed his commands.

SUMMER LOVIN’ TORTURE PARTY
    When the gaslight blinks to say my inspiration tank’s low, I look to the Middle Ages. A man back then who had a beef with his neighbor didn’t hire a suit, he simply challenged the neighbor to a battle to the death. Since God wouldn’t let an innocent man down, whoever remained standing was righteous. The other favored mode until Trial by Jury yawned its way into common practice in the 13 th century was the Ordeal, in which the accused would have to walk through fire, carry a hot iron, or run the gauntlet. And if you passed, you were innocent—opposite logic of the Puritan “If she burns, she’s a witch” model. Pretty sensible, if grisly. For me, nothing puts my life on a path like a good coin flip or a straw draw. Give the divine room to do its mysterious thing. I feel for the courts, making their judgments, but their errors are well-documented. When an innocent man finds himself strapped to a chair he’ll never stand up from, it’s the outcome of a fallen world without the courage to leave a thing like justice up to chance.

*
    Dear Mom,
    What have you done?
    Billy

LOGISTICALLY, A REAL MOMENTUM-WRECKER
    One night at skits back when I was a camper, one of the tight-jeaned older heartthrob guys from Cabin 1 got up and said, “Here’s a song I like,” and they’d rigged up the PA to play a seven-minute David Bazan song, the first I’d heard by him. I later acquired the guy’s whole catalogue, listened my way through Bazan’s ascent / descent from sleepy Christian sweetie pie to conflicted Christian questioner to pissed-off agnostic antagonizer. All his best music is from that middle period when he was in the thick of it. The track in question, “Secret of the Easy Yoke,” is a gorgeous downer about wanting to know God while ever put off by His parishioners. “I still have never seen you,” Bazan sings in the chorus, “and some days I don’t love you at all.” After the bridge,