Oh, well.

I got stuck on Beauregard again. I think he's going to turn one of my murder victims into a love interest. Stupid git. So I'm abandoning him for a week or two. Here's the first part of the new story, mainly written as black-humor escapism from the Really Black Humor of Beauregard:

The Uncanny Adventures of Mrs. Kurtz, part one: On Hold.

Mrs. Kurtz kicked aside piles of dirty laundry, copies of Cosmopolitan, half-empty cans of Diet Coke (sticky and as infested with flies as week-old corpses), and couple of cats to find the phone. The phone! When was the last time she used the damn phone?

She had internet.

She had cable modem.

She had.

She dialed the 1-800 customer service number with rock-steady fingers. It was taped to the monitor; in the early days she'd dialed it daily.

"Your call may be monitored for quality purposes...Your expected wait time is twenty minutes. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. Please do not hang up and dial again; this will only lengthen your wait time. Your call is very valuable to us; please stay on line."

What followed were 18 minutes of terror.

....and this story, you might say, contains some non-fictional elements.