1. It was early morning. The kind of time only seen by those with upset stomachs or insomniacs, or those wakened by squirrels.

Hannibal was in the latter category. A squirrel ran across the cot where he slept under the softly blowing trees.

He awakened immediately and bit the head off the troublesome squirrel, and then tried to go back to sleep while the squirrel's body cooled under the cot. He would make a nice fondue of squirrel for brunch, if he could manage to get back to sleep. But, sometimes, he observed, sometimes an awakening during a certain part of the sleep cycle will prevent a subject -- he still thought in clinical psychiatry terms -- from going back to sleep for up to three sleep cycles. And we all know that a sleep cycle is 90 minutes. So three of them would be four and a half hours.

The time was 4:35, which meant that he wouldn't get back to sleep until 9:05 or so. And this really sucked. He reached under the cot, grabbed the still warm body of the squirrel and gently sucked the spinal fluid out of the spinal column before slitting the squirrel down the middle, ripping it open, and eating most of the meat by scraping it out of the now inside out squirrel with his teeth. He paused only to spit out a half digested acorn.

Disgusting, he thought. This is all too damned legal.

But, one must do what one can when one is on the lam and has to be silent.

Currently, he was wanted by the FBI, the CIA, the USDA, and even the Postal Police. The latter was a surprise to him. As part of his effort to find harmony between his appetites and the needs of the world he had been created in, Hannibal tried only to eat people who posed a threat to others. Postal workers seemed ideal. But the Postal Police didn't see it that way.

They're trying to stamp me out, Hannibal joked to himself. He lifted the letter carrier's hat off his head to scratch off some lice.

Well, there was no undoing it. He was awake now. And he was damned hungry after his squirrelatizer. Maybe he would wander into town and wait for the Department of Motor Vehicles to open. Now that's one branch of the civil service no-one would mind if I ate, he theorized.

From the yard outside the lake house, one could hear him stomping around on the creaking floorboards, and urinating in the bathroom. It was clear from the muffled sounds one could still hear from the driveway that the house contained someone who was already having a bad day.

2. "Carrot soup. Spinach soup. Tomato soup. Who the devil buys this stuff?" Linda Blair asked her girlfriend, Carrie.

"Don't ask me," Carrie replied. "You're the soup girl. You do all the shopping."

"Well, if you weren't in your room listening to those Saturday Night Fever and Happy Days Fonz albums all the time, you might make it down to the store yourself."

Linda was just teasing Carrie; which was OK, as long as you didn't go too far with it. The two had been live-in lovers since they met in Sausalito in 1982.

They had each been in trouble with the Church and with the Law on and off through their teens and early twenties. Fortunately for them, they had been minors when most of the trouble had been going on, so there were no records of the strange deaths and satanic goings on that had surrounded the womens' early years.

"Who'd have thunk it was all because we were having such a hard time coming out of the closet?" Carrie told her Wednesday night therapy group. "I never really liked blood, all that much," she continued, "it was just a symbol for a much needed change in my life that would remove the roadblocks I was putting up in my own path. The cries for help from others were really my own cries for help. And slaughtering everybody at the Prom. I mean, could it have been more obvious?

"Carrie and I were complete opposites," Linda Blair told the nice interviewer from Playboy's Real Lesbian Couples video. "She would cover a room, well, a gymnasium, with blood. I would spin around and projectile vomit pea soup. Red and Green. It just doesn't get more polar than that. It was always just a metaphor for the kind of physical love we were meant to have."

The footage the Playboy crew took of Linda and Carrie's sexual fantasy wound up more graphic than most of the Playboy footage for the video. What with all the blood and green spit-up and all. But the girls, both the girls, had such nice tits that Hef said, "This is a little rough, guys, but we need more nice tits that are natural for this video. We keep shooting the same three models of implant tits, and we have to stick to our new ‘natural beauty’ policy no matter what. Jergins sales are dropping! Go back and reshoot! Think of something, some new theme. I don't care. Now stop interrupting my blowjob."

So the crew returned to the girls' apartment. They asked if they could redecorate it as a Mexican Restaurant, so they could maybe do something with the red tobasco and green havenjero pepper sauces. Maybe Linda and Carrie’s giant spicy tortilla fantasy, or something.

The girls knew they weren't dealing with Stanley Kubrick here, or anything. But, still, the money was good. And there were these inspirational talks from the producer about how their naturally beautiful breasts would revolutionize the industry. And by the way, they had nice legs, too. He was a charmer. But it was mostly the money.

The one rule they settled on was, No Real Pepper Sauce! This was easily agreed on since Playboy's insurance company had said basically the same thing. Giant tortillas and huge chunks of "shredded" cheese, cut tomatoes, and "shredded lettuce" that was really seven or eight pieces of lettuce sewn together, were brought in.

OK, ladies, let's make your own sauce, and ROLLING.

They lived on that dough for years. Fortunately, they got paid up front. The video was a flop. It turned out that men not only still preferred fake breasts in their soft-core jerk-off videos, but that a better implant technology had come along and made the new fake breasts better than anyone had imagined.

Though the extra tortillas and giant quesidillas had lasted almost a year, they were long gone. The money was just running out, too. And, Linda had just discovered, they were out of pea soup. To make things worse, Carrie just opened a letter from the Bank.

"They're going to RePosess the house," she said.

PART TWO

The Great American Pastime
BY CHRISTOPHER CURRY

Something More
BY TROY NEW YORK

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