just a cost of doing business

It is most likely that one would not even accidentally reflect upon Helga, but especially not sitting in the gynecologist’s office waiting to hear the results of your blood test. However Becky, who went by the name of Harmony Felicity at night on the streets of Berlin, had an intimate understanding of what life would have been like for Helga if only Hans Barringer had properly connected his pigtails to his trailer on that cold rainy night.

Even as early as the age of three Helga had desired to grow up and be an illusionist. She knew this might mean an eventual apprenticeship working with David Copperfield where she had a more than reasonable chance of being sexually molested. Not surprisingly, this concern carried little weight with Helga as her own family had passed her around like a casserole dish at family reunions almost as soon as she ventured out of diapers.

Helga would meticulously map out every sleight-of-hand, storyboarding every detail of each one of her routines, right down to the whiskers on the rabbits that she would pull out of hats. By age six, if you listened closely, and very late at night, you could hear Helga sawing additional trap doors into the floor of her bedroom. Helga would make her toys disappear, she made her friends disappear, she even made her little brother disappear, but try as she might, Helga could not make the adult male members of her family disappear. As such, whenever David Copperfield entered Helga’s mind, she simply wrote him off as a cost of doing business.

Dr. Adalbert Noftzinger considered the magazines that he ordered from Helga in much the same manner, just a cost of doing business. Noftzinger had but just a few torn and tattered back issues of Sports Illustrated magazine, and one issue of Newsweek that no longer possessed it’s cover page for his clients to read while they were awaiting their visit with their doctor. Now Harmony was able to enjoy the current month’s issue of Redbook, just one of the many subscriptions Noftzinger had ordered when Helga made a cold call on his office.

Ironically, Dr. Noftzinger’s substantial order caused a considerable delay in Helga’s departure, a delay that most likely was the next to the last nail in her own coffin. When Helga finally crammed herself back into that van with the other twelve teenagers who were also runaways, her thoughts drifted back to her newest routine that she had been carefully diagramming in her notebook. Chances are Helga was still sketching in her book in her final moments.

The driver of the van that was packed with those runaways never actually saw the semi truck as he swerved in the rain to avoid hitting a rabbit scurrying across the road. The truck’s driver Hans Barringer, had been distracted by a prostitute at the last rest stop, and as a result, failed to notice that all of his taillights were not working. Hans had pulled off onto the shoulder to try and fix the problem after being flagged by another driver.

The driver of the van lost control and collided with the rear of Barringer’s truck, slicing off the top half of the van as well as the heads and the futures of twelve teenagers and the head of it's driver. The wind then caught and scattered the pages of Helga’s sketchbook, and the pages began to dance about the tops of a barley field near the road. Slowly the rain began to saturate the sketches, and as the ink started to run, the pages themselves weighed down by the rain, settled into the cold wet dirt of the barley field.

Harmony would never know the story behind the magazine she read as she waited for Dr. Noftzinger to provide her with the results of her blood test. She did however enjoy the article about the positives and negatives of utilizing wicker in floral arrangements. The momentary distraction that Redbook provided Harmony was quickly forgotten after her consultation with the doctor. Now Harmony had to figure out whether or not she should tell the fifty-three members of the Bundestag who were her steady clients, that she was infected with a roaring case of genital herpes.

Editor’s note: Normally, I will not write something that exceeds 500 words unless cold hard cash is involved, but a good online friend of mine, the writer behind The Synchronicity of Indeterminacy, has just recently gone through his own little personal private hell. I thought I would comply with an open request of his with the hopes of letting him know that everything is going to be OK.