that monster there...

      They were stopping, kaput. Not dead, just stuck. Everywhere.      No one knew why. It didn't matter what it looked like, or what anyone said - all the big ideas didn't change the fact that heaps of people had run out of whatever it was that had made them go. The only certainty was the mess it made for the rest of us.    "Why Papa?"      "I don't know. Maybe they ran out of Wednesdays."      "Maybe they ran out  of this way's and that way's!"     Broken people clotted the avenues in Midtown, shut down the tunnels and bridges, brought Chinatown to a heaping, shrieking standstill.      Glassy eyed children, pink-toothed, bubble-lipped, some alone, others hands clasped loosely to vacant eyed parents, burbled mid-stride under traffic lights that had also become static.      "Can I have his yoyo?"      "Don't even think about it."     ...

         "Haha!?"      "My father named me; Budrow Wilson Dexter Laurel and Hardy Har Har." Buddy smiled. "One word though. You have to say it as one word."      She almost smiled but instead her lip fish-hooked to one side and held.      "Pop was a schmuck," he added      Then she smiled.      "And you? Venice? Is that a nickname or...?" The question hung off the edge of Buddy's wide smile.      Venice made you and me with a loose index finger between her own slim chest and Haha's. "Schmuck spawn, both of us," she whispered.      Buddy liked her. She reminded him of a soft childhood moment that he couldn't fully touch.      "So they call me Nice, or Nitzia - Angel, sometimes, if they're happy or drunk or both."      She'd been relocated. It had taken sacks of cash and the removal of two consecutive links in the chai...