For Jennifer Curtis

It was three o'clock on a Sunday. Only thirty minutes left until her break; thirty minutes until she could get high again. These days she needed her fix more and more. The pressures of running a failing newsstand/bookstore where every regular customer needed to be in the self-help section but wanted to stay up to date on all the latest royalty paparazzi gossip weighed heavily on her. She was 45 and single. Never married because she was self conscious about the idea of someone loving her for who she really was. Most men couldn't get past the eyepatch and she didn't trust the ones who genuinely could. The prospect of getting laid by one of the barflys at the local watering hole held about as much appeal for her as the prospect of going to bed with a man-sized housefly.

Jennifer Curtis lived a melancholy life until the age of 50 when she hit the lottery and invested in real estate. She kept her drug habit (but with a much more constructive approach to the whole thing), took a variety of male lovers between the ages of 26 and 33, and died happy and fat at the age of 73, in Key West Florida.