1) I can spend a whole day in my office without once remembering to need to take a pill;
2) When I come out, Daisy Duke is always the first one there, grabbing my comm and eating the ish with hungry eyes.
I start to collect the day's issue, pasting in the pict of Tony and Daisy under the masthead.
#
I'm on a Harbourfront patio with a pitcher of shandy in front of me, dark shades, and a fabbed pin in my knee when the mothaship comes back.
I took the cure in February, slipped out and left a note so Daisy wouldn't insist on being noble and coming with, lying about my name and camping out in the ER for a week in the newly recaptured Women's College Hospital before a doc could see me.
Daisy kissed me on the cheek when I got home and then went upside my head, and Tony made everyone come and see my new knee. While I was in, someone had sorted out the affairs of the Process, and a government trustee had left a note for me at general delivery. I got over fifty dollars and bought a plane-ticket for a much-deserved week in the Honduras. I tried to take Daisy, but she had stuff to do. I beach-fronted it until the melanomas came out, then home again, home again, only to find that the house crime-scene taped and Tony the Tiger and Daisy Duke were nowhere to be found in a month of hysterical searching.
So now, on the first beautiful day of spring after a fricken evil, grey winter of pain and confusion, I work on my tan and sip beer and lemonade until the sirens go and the traffic stops and every receiver is turned to the Emergency Broadcast System — *This is not a test*.
I flip open my comm. There's a hubble of the mothaship, whirlagig and widdershins around our rock. The audio track is running, but it's just talking heads, not a transmission from the mothaship, so I tune it out.
The world holds its breath again.