Frank

Frank's mother was a circus performer, one of those tight-skinned women who would spin suspended from her hair above the peanut-eating crowd, smiling like the soul of pain. Frank watched from the shoulders of his tiger-taming dad, who spoke a language Frank never learned.

»O Vidalia,« said Frank, »you're about to become a quiche.«

It will be important to know where Frank Leigh Dearie grew up, whether he enjoyed baseball, how
he felt about guns, butter, the color yellow.

That afternoon, when civilization had triumphantly defeated nature in Franks mind, he found that his game of golf was even better than usual. He played with younger men, and, as he told Mrs. Bredalbane with pride upon his return, he had »polished them off nicely.« His face was still shining with pleasure when she captured him in the hall; and though he looked, as she said to herself, spindle-shanked in his stockings of Scotch plaid, his appearance, since he was unaware that it could strike anybody as ridiculous, failed to dampen his enthusiasm.

Frank said to Blossom, »I am the perfect anonymous internet entity, a user without a clause, a true blobular, modular internet citizen, a new man without qualities.«

»Or woman,« Blossom said, exhaling a plume of blue thyme.

»Talking to you,« said Vidalia, »is like swallowing a waning moon.«

Frank lifted an eyebrow, spun on a heel, and continue to slope down the Lost Highway. After a few steps, he donned his green sunglasses.

A medicine man appeared on Frank's green horizon.

Frank Mills is now known to his friends and to the
CIA as Frank Leigh Dearie. He was last seen
at 2 am on Franklin St. in downtown Boston, wearing a boa constrictor and stumbling all over his platform heels.

»Mrs Sprindlebone!« cried Frank. »You have more polish than a zloty. Come with me down the lost highway and make yourself my compadre!«

Mrs. Bredalbane of Maida Vale takes one step, then another, and another, down the Lost Highway.