"Fred, don't you think so?" he asked, and the room began to empty. I made my way to the door, but hung back to listen.
"Joe, I have to tell you something. I'm a...Republican."
The look on Joe's face was the same stricken horror that a lot of college guys get when their life-long best friends admit to being gay.
"What? You mean....how could.....This whole time? You can't be! What about all those vegetarian dinners? What about all that illegal music downloading? You can't be! You've always been so liberal!"
"I was just doing it because I didn't want you to hate me, Joe."
I walked out smirking. I went into another common room where
He put his hands on the table and said "See? I've broken one of my fingers. Guess which one."
The middle finger of his right hand twisted like a salamander and was perhaps half the diameter of the other fingers. I was on the point of asking him what happened when
He put it down and started eating while
Then I had to leave. I was moving some furniture with the help of
We started down the highway. The two of us had to sit in the back holding onto the furniture, which was only loosely tied down. At one point, one of the chests came loose and fell into the road and we decided to get off the highway. I realized that there was some sort of mass migration going on because not only were all four lanes of the highway full of people moving in their Ford Expedition conestoga wagons. Even the four lanes that would have been used for oncoming traffic were full of people leaving the city. It didn't occur to me to wonder why, though.
We turned off the road and were immediately on the side of a barren mountain, on a road so tiny that our three-foot-wide conveyance filled the entire trail. Even if someone had wanted to pass us, there was nowhere for us to pull over. We finally came to a place where the road widened and a guy went flying past us on a horse.
He turned into a compound that looked like a small town a hundred years ago, except that the whole thing was behind a huge fence with a wrought-iron gate. Just then,
I waited with the driver of our conveyance, and when
I asked around and finally found
Once again, I have no idea what this could mean.