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gone. The only thing left on his seat is some animal fur.
      The bus pulls into the Hollywood Greyhound station that, for all its mythic reputation, is small and unimpressive. I stagger out dazed, squinting at the blinding Southern California daylight. I can barely see and don't know where to go or what to do next.
      For a while I think I see a coyote crossing the street.
      Then there is a flash of light. I'm afraid that I've come all the way to Hollywood, just to be nuked. Was it world war? Terrorism? Foreign? Domestic? It doesn't really matter when you're being vaporized . . .
      My eyesight comes back, and dingy, old Hollywood now looks like a Technicolor dancing cartoon backdrop. The street people, hookers, and bus passengers are all now cartoon characters.
      I look at myself.
      I am a cartoon character.
      There's a spooky laugh, like the Indian's. I turn and see . . . Coyote!
      He's a cartoon Coyote, in a three-piece suit, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigar.
      "Hey, kid," he says, "how do you like it? And this is only the beginning. There's a lot of work to do. We can use a few good cartoonists. Ya want a job?"
      I say yes.
      And now, in real present tense, because it isn't the tick-tock whiteman's time anymore, but something like a cross between Indian time and Einstein's space-time, with the past and future happening now. The myth and dreamtime happen before my very eyes, as I draw it. I'm doing my part in Coyote's new, improved mythotech trickster business.
      Fade out, but not to black – fade to brightness.

Spicy Detective #3

    Jerey Ford

    On the bleary-eyed, whiskey side of midnight, when even the shadows have shadows and ghosts die of loneliness only to return as pale, flypaper memories of their former selves, when triggers are cocked and cocks are triggered, and all the dames left standing after sleep has swamped the world have a pile of bleached coif like a hair hive abuzz with stingered schemes of revenge and lust and greed, before the lipstick melts into a trickle of blood and the mascara mixes with tears to write lines of graveyard poetry on pancake masks (elegies of regret to be read by the first rays of a sun that might never rise), after the dirty cash has passed hands and the whispered promises are made with fingers crossed and gams uncrossed, leading to the split-tongued French kiss of Mephistopheles, Rent Johnson, of the square jaw, the doublebreasted pinstripe and existential malaise, private eye, sniffer out of the why of treachery, the how of betrayal, the who gives a flying fuck of good gone bad and bad gone worse like a shiv in the kidneys, a brass knuckle sandwich for grandma, a pair of concrete galoshes for a sad sack on a losing streak, whose present case was the search for Sammy Anole, the Lizard King, a stout dwarf of a heinous killer with serpent eyes and twin six-foot iguanas in his basement that cleared the flesh from his victim's corpses like two green-scaled Hoover uprights with needle teeth and blood colder than the beer at The Swan Dive, cleaved, with his flesh, snub-nose special, the hair-rimmed portal of soft wetness belonging to Winter Darling, Anole's current squeeze, spelunking her well-traveled cavern path, in and out, like one of those dying ghosts caught between coming and going, the bed springs in the flop house dive overlooking Pork Chop alley, bathed in blue neon from the Pabst sign across the street, squealing out a half-assed version of the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)," and caught, in the reflection of Miss Darling's glass eye, Sammy's dragon stare in the doorway, which made him reach, with lightning speed, for his ankle-holstered piece, and shoot over his left shoulder, while shooting down below, directly drilling the thimble heart of the Lizard King, whose first sound heard through ghostly ears was the gasping, passionless sob of Winter.

Auspicious Eggs

    James Morrow

    Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown