Got Your Nose

Well I decided to accept Dave's challenge, issued through Gmail chat earlier tonight while I filed bullshit academic advising records, to blog every day. Blog a day. Blogaday. I should get bonus points for doing this while my sister and her entire family are in town. How many people are in town? My sister and her entire family. Thankfully they're not staying with us, as this place probably couldn't handle ... seven people.

I am looking forward to seeing them, and I'm sure my sister and her husband are looking forward to getting out of Iowa (they were vacationing here before I moved here, although they're not really into the theme park thing), but it seems their kids are now just moving into the relationships-crushes-etc. parts of their lives where they unsurprisingly are not excited about leaving their state for better than a week. How do I know this? Through the weird magic of Facebook.

Anyway I bring this up because it has me feeling awkward already.

. . .

People ride bicycles here with benches fixed to the back. Actually they drive a lot of rickshaw-like things. I've been playing Red Dead Redemption lately and now every time a rickshaw tools by outside it sounds like a wagon carrying TNT on its way to blow the door off my building.

. . . 

Do you remember my horror novel about the time-traveling sex fiend who jumps from generation to generation stealing body parts from the women of one family, until he has enough to sew together a thirty-generation sex doll? Well, now I have a new novel, and it's called Got Your Nose. It opens at a young boy's birthday party. His uncle weaves toward him, logy with cake and beer swallowed cheap and fast before the party. "Hey, champ," the uncle says. His hand snakes out to the boy's face and comes back with the thumb between the fingers. "Got your nose." The boy erupts in tears, screams, hands to his face, runs for the house, crashes into the door, sees blood coming between his fingers. Twenty years later he's a school janitor by day and by night a serial mutilator. If this were a movie the trailer would end with a dark screen, with frantic breathing, and then the wet sound of a saw. Someone screams. Someone else says, "Got your nose."