NYC Midnight: Killing Cookie Abiloni & Other Associated Transgressions

Drama 

A Business Trip

Biologist

Brief Synopsis: Wayne and Bella have murder on their minds when they happen to meet at the bar across from the Continental Hotel.

Thrill Before the Kill

Planning to kill and doing it are two very different things. The tension building in both their bodies was a testament to that truth. His was a simple job with one target. Hers was complicated with global consequences. Neither knew as they struck up a conversation on the stools at the bar across from the Continental Hotel in Washington, D.C. that the other was suppressing the anxiety of his and her’s first potential kill. Yet that energy was like a magnet attracting the two together.

She expounded on how the government was destroying the environment and exploiting biology for devious reasons. He commented on how American culture robbed people of their individuality. Both agreed that a reckoning was coming.

The energy percolated in their blood stream, mixing with the alcohol. Just one other thing could alleviate the stress. They both sensed it. Just before midnight they entered his room — No. 910 at the Continental — and the alleviating commenced.

As the throes of passion subsided and the booze dissipated making his limbs feel as if they were floating, the compulsion to confess overwhelmed him.

“A man paid me ten thousand dollars to kill his wife today.”

She blinked at him, shaking away the pull of a deep vodka-induced slumber.

“Who?”

“The woman you spent the afternoon with at the White House.”

“You’re going to kill Cookie?”

“That’s the plan.” He reached over to the nightstand, put on a glove, and then pulled a pistol from the drawer. “She’s in the adjoining room, and the door is unlocked. Do you think I should do it?”

The Abilonis Check In

Cookie began her adult life rolling in dough. Just not the green kind. After a mediocre high school career, her uncle hired her as cheap labor in his bakery in Middleburg, Virginia. Mornings passed with her elbow-deep in mixing up bread, cakes and, of course, cookies. While working the counter one day a year later, she met Lou Abiloni, a rising star in the Middleburg realty scene. Several dates and a few extra orders of cookies for non-existent house showings later, Lou proposed to Cookie.

Happily ever after from there.

Well, mostly.

Twin boys – Lou Jr. and Lester – arrived, grew, raised a bit of hell, and then went off to college into ever-fruitful Liberal Arts programs.  Lou Jr. is living in sin with some woman ten years his senior, and Lester occupies the Abiloni’s basement between shifts of delivering pizza around Middleburg. For Cookie and Lou, twenty-five years of life flew by with the usual ups and downs of a marriage.  Now both were waiting for the “Death do us part” part. Well, waiting isn’t exactly the right word.

Trying to hurry the parting part along is what brings the Abilonis to the lobby of the Continental Hotel. Lou, with his dark hair combed over the top of his pale dome and wearing a wrinkled blue suit, consulted his wristwatch every few moments. Cookie, a stout woman with hips wider than her shoulders, believed in perms that twirled her red locks in tight loops close to her head and in sweatshirts bought from Wal-Mart featuring animals and kooky sayings. In the lobby, she sported a sky-blue number with a squirrel clutching a chestnut and with yellow lettering proclaiming “LET’S GET NUTTY!” She packed a matching one for Lou despite his vehement protests against wearing anything but suits outside of the house.

“I bet I can get Trump to put on the sweatshirt,” Cookie said. In front of them a long-legged blonde dickered with the clerk about her room. “I’ll get a picture of it, and I betcha they’ll put it on TV.”

“First, Mr. Trump doesn’t have time for that. He’s too busy. Second, you’re not seeing him because you’re not leaving the hotel. You’d get lost.”

“Too busy, that’s rich. All men are just too damn busy.”

“Not that again. I told you three months ago that this wasn’t a vacation. I’ve got work to do.”

Lou had told her that this trip was for business and not pleasure a hundred times before, knowing she’d never listen. He planned this early spring trip to D.C. for two big reasons. The first was legitimate work. He’d lucked his way into a ripe property just outside of Middleburg that he was dangling in front of three, maybe even four, possible investors from the D.C. area. His first meeting was later in the afternoon and that’s why the Abilonis arrived at the Continental shortly after noon. Lou just needed to check-in and drop off all his luggage, Cookie included.

His second big reason was waiting at the bar across the street. 

The Belle of Germ Warfare

Belle Blackberry’s itinerary for the afternoon, like Lou’s, was tight. She needed to get this dingleberry clerk to switch her rooms, and then she needed to catch a cab down to Pennsylvania Avenue. Like Cookie, her thoughts were on Pennsylvania Avenue’s most important resident. The difference was that Belle had no interest in pictures or sweatshirts. Behind Belle the aging couple argued, and she focused all her mental energy on the skinny little termite of a man standing behind the desk.

“The room reeks of cigar smoke.”

“That’s impossible, mam. That room has been smoke-free forever, and we take great pride in cleaning the rooms and preparing fresh linens daily.”

“Well, pride comes before the fall, and this hotel’s online ratings are falling precipitously each second I stand here.”

The man behind the desk, a neurotic thirty-something with an overbite and scoliosis, was named Leonard, and this gorgeous blonde intimidated him.

“Let me check the computer,” Leonard offered. He was stingy about room changes. The Continental was a popular, but dated, destination hotel, and with numerous special requests, the slightest room change could send his entire system into hysterics. The other desk clerks just made switches without any regard for the precision of his system. “I have a double on the ninth floor, but you don’t need two beds.”

“That’s fine.”

“But there’s only one of you,” Leonard had a fierce sense of symmetry and the notion of one person staying in a double made his left eyelid twitch. He sighed and started counting in his head. That’s what his therapist said to do. It was stupid.

Minutes later, Belle Blackberry was alone in her room with the curtains open. The American capital with all its brilliant devotion to white shrines honoring white men appeared just below the horizon. On one bed was her overnight bag. Standing beside the other bed, she opened her briefcase. Inside were three vials that appeared empty, but definitely were not, resting on a bed of foam.

The briefcase was a present from her mother when Belle earned her PhD in microbiology. Her dreams then were to study germs and find disease cures, but just as this country was currently perverted by a false ideology, Belle Blackberry’s professional career became corrupted into creating germs – very resilient and active airborne germs. She lifted one of the vials.

“This one is for you, Mr. President.”

Everybody, Wayne Chung

His given name was Wayne Chung. No kidding. His Chinese parents were so eager to blend into their Omaha, Nebraska neighborhood that they gave their son an American first name. He spent his high school years going to parties that started with his schoolmates shouting “Everybody Wayne Chung tonight!” The joke spilled over to the hallways and when he graduated somebody rigged the sound system to play the song when he received his diploma. As the rolled-up paper slipped into his hand, he never believed more that his destiny was to kill people. The prankster responsible for the graduation humiliation would have been a good start, but he never found out who did it, and two years later, he moved away from Omaha and his parents with the stated intentions of becoming an engineer. He real objective was to become an assassin, just like in his favorite video games.

Soon his objective would be achieved. The pistol holstered under his jacket rubbed against his ribs, the silencer was in the pocket of his khakis. Above him a baseball game blared on a big screen and a Jack and Coke warmed in front of him. He shouldn’t drink anything until it was over, but his nerves were snapping all his synapses with little jolts of electricity. He needed to calm himself somehow. A pear-shaped white man in a blue suit dropped onto the stool next to him.

“Are you Lee Greenwood?” The man asked.

“Yes,” Wayne replied.

The man pushed an envelope over. Wayne opened it, counted the bills and then pulled out the picture of the woman and a hotel keycard with 910 scribbled in pen on top.

“This her?”

“Yes, my wife…”

“I don’t want to know more. Where is she?”

“Across the street, we just checked into the Continental. Room 912. I am heading across the city for a meeting, and she’ll probably leave in the next hour or so.”

“How do you know she’ll leave?”

“Because I told her not too.”

Wayne sipped on his drink, put the photo of the woman into the inside pocket of his jacket, and stood up.

“Hey, you’re kind of little for this kind of thing, aren’t you?” The man asked. Wayne stood only a hair over five feet and weighed about one hundred and ten pounds. He flashed the holster at the man.

“It’s all about the size of the gun.” Wayne made to leave, but stopped. “Why not just divorce her?”

“Shit, I got some big things going down, and I’m not giving half of it away.”

Oreos and Climate Change

            “He’s screwing some broad at his office.” This woman, who was either named Cookie or had offered Belle one of the Oreos she pulled from a sandwich bag extracted from her monstrous purple purse, or perhaps both, said.

“Who?”

“My husband. He thinks he’s sneaky, but he’s an idiot.”

“Oh.”

“You sure you don’t want an Oreo? They are my guilty pleasure. I’ve baked millions of cookies, but sometimes these things just hit the spot. Something Lou never really could do, eh.” Cookie elbowed Belle for extra emphasis as the cab stopped. The columns of the White House appeared to their right.

Somehow Cookie had infiltrated Belle’s reconnaissance trip to the White House in one shared elevator ride from the ninth floor to the hotel lobby.

“No thanks.”

“So, you love the President, too?”

“No, I think he’s destroying the earth.”

Cookie bit into her last Oreo, chewing slowly.

“Oh, so you’re one of those liberals?”

“No, I’m a scientist. I’ve seen the evidence, and if something is not done, the world will end.”

Cookie kept chewing, but the conversation was basically over.

On the Target’s Trail

Wayne followed the two women all afternoon to get to know his target. His plan for the execution was already in place.

Revelations

Lou’s afternoon meeting was a disaster as the investor clearly didn’t care about a property way over in Middleburg. His mother always warned him about seeking greener pastures, and the realization of this lesson was causing his ulcer to flare up. He wasn’t going to hit it big after all, he knew it without even talking to the other potential investors. After downing half a bottle of Pepto he purchased at a Walgreens, Lou spent the cab ride back to the hotel staring at a picture from his wallet of Cookie holding their two infant sons from twenty-some years earlier.

“My God, what have I done?”

You can imagine his surprise and relief when he entered his room to find his wife very much alive. For the first time in his life he was glad to have been swindled out of ten grand.

Before he knew it, they were making love like teenagers. When they finished, they ordered room service, watched half a movie, shockingly made love again, and then fell completely asleep. Lou never gave a second thought about the door to the adjoining room that he unlocked earlier.

Revelations II

“So, all you have to do is go through that door and do it?” Belle knelt on her knees on the mattress beside him.

“Yep. I decided to do them both and make it look like a murder suicide. I even bought the gun with a fake ID with his name. He’s the only one that can connect me to them.”

“When?”

“In the middle of the night sometime and then leave in the morning before the staff finds them.”

He placed the gun back in the drawer and removed the glove. Never in his life did he think he’d be in a bed with a woman so beautiful without having to pay her. It didn’t even enter his mind that it was a mistake to tell her any of this.

“Are you going to go through with it?” She bit her lip, wrinkling her brows in an expression he couldn’t exactly read.

He shrugged.

“They aren’t really alive anyways. They are just robots programmed to simulate living. They love each other, but they don’t remember why. They love their children, but they don’t show it. They love America because they are supposed to. But killing them is something I can’t go back on, you know. Up until tonight, I’ve never had anything I cared about losing. Then I met you…”

He thought she blushed, but before he could continue she straddled him. He hardened and she guided him inside her again.

“You told me your secret,” she said, then moaned slightly as she rocked slowly up and down. “Before you say anymore, let me tell you mine. I think you’ll like it.”

Checking Out

            The chaos inflicting his precious room assignment system kept Leonard awake all night. At sunrise, he gave up his futile attempt at sleep and left his tiny apartment to relieve the overnight clerk. Might as well get an early start to achieve perfection for the upcoming night at the Continental.

When the tall blonde who started all his problems stepped off the elevator holding hands with a short Asian fellow that looked vaguely familiar, Leonard felt some relief. Even though the official paperwork would be wrong in saying that she stayed alone in a double room on the ninth floor, he knew two people actually occupied the room. Symmetry, he thought, maybe enough symmetry to keep everything from crashing down. He was wrong.

The couple got a cab together just outside the lobby door, the woman clutched a briefcase, placing it across her lap as the car door closed.

Leonard never thought about the two when they found the mess in 912. When people started getting sick at the White House, any investigation concerning the Abilonis took a back seat, and by summer, Leonard and most of the Eastern seaboard had much bigger things to worry about than a balanced room ledger at the Continental.

Red’s Book Reviews: We Were the Lucky Ones by Gloria Hunter

I have to be honest I spent so much of this book thinking about the line in the Beatles song “A Day In the Life,” that states “A crowd of people turned away, but I just had to look, having read the book.” This compelling account of a Jewish family in Poland during World War II just creates that feeling in reverse. We’ve all seen the “movie” of this story. The plight of Jewish people under the Nazis and even those under Stalin in Russia is well-documented, so when you read a story like this that provides real characters and narratives it’s easy to be scared to turn the page because the fact is that the stories didn’t end happy for most Jews in this time and place. This is a remarkably well-researched and well-told story, and I’d recommend this to anyone to read.

Up Next: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Red’s Book Reviews: The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs

The Know-It-All details Jacobs’ educational endeavor of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from start to finish. His narrative takes us through the alphabet while relating entries to his own life. He takes up the challenge to recapture the confidence he had as a ten-year-old who felt he was the smartest boy in the world along with conquering a task that his father failed to complete. He has always been intellectually competitive with his father, a lawyer who has a number degrees and written numerous books on law. Driving the story is the pursuit of intelligence, the definition of intelligence, and the way knowledge shapes the relationships each of us make.

I admire the dedication this took, but I won’t lie that at times I felt like the narrative and its lessons were done a bit heavy-handedly. While I am a fan of creative non-fiction, I always grow somewhat uncomfortable with books like this because I spend a lot of the time wondering how much of the writer’s goal was shaped by the idea that he’s going to write about it later. Once that enters my mind, it’s hard to forget, making some of the neat connections between entries and his life seem less genuine because he created the connection to fit his narrative. Still, it’s a fun read and I recommend giving it a chance.

Up next: We Were the Lucky Ones by Gloria Hunter

Red’s Book Reviews: The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

This novella is about a man in his late twenties early thirties – hard to know which because he tells other characters different ages throughout the story – who “suffers” from some sort of personality disorder – likely OCD and perhaps some sort of autism. His life revolves around a bizarre yet strict set of rules such as not stepping off of curbs onto the street. It’s an enlightening glimpse into how seemingly normal people battle mental illness – the main character appropriately wins an essay contest with the theme of persuading the reader that the writer is the most “Average American.” The conflict of the story is can the main character overcome his debilitating issues. The story is written with sincerity, sarcasm and humor all wrapped together. One thing of note is that I struggled to divorce the main character from being Steve Martin. It must because I am more aware of the personality of the writer than in other books. The only other time I’ve encountered a similar issue is when Chuck Klosterman wrote the fiction novel “Downtown Owl.” I’ve read so much of his non-fiction, that I just heard that voice/person in all his characters.

Up next: The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs

Red’s Book Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This is a romance cloaked in the science fiction trope of time traveling. The genre might be perfect for the trope because it allows the author to gloss over some of the icky specifics of how the time travelling occurs. Her approach is to make it a genetic disorder, one the traveler cannot control. The chaos this creates leads to his relationship with Clare. She meets him first, she as a child and him as a man in his thirties and forties. In his linear timeline, he doesn’t meet her until his mid-to-late twenties. This allows for a book in two halves where first he has the advantage of knowing all the things to come in their relationship, and then she reverses that advantage as he experiences her childhood moments while they are married. Eventually this leads to a point – clearly the conclusion. I thought this was an original book, but one that finished with a cliché. That’s where the romance genre probably hurts this for me. Romances often end with a cliché. I was hoping for a little more.

Up next: Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

Red’s Book Reviews: Straight Man by Richard Russo

The most impressive thing about Richard Russo is his ability to write serious literature with so much humor. It’s like he’s able to grab real people off the street, turn them into characters for a book, and mix in all the real-life irony with the various personal and professional trails and heartbreak we all confront. Straight Man is the story of a middle-aged creative writing teacher at a middling university. He holds the interim title of Department Chair, a position he neither really wants nor wants to lose. The politics of a department ring true, at least from the professional experience I have dealing with people and power. Of course, it’s higher education so budget issues are part of the issue. Throw in the return of his estranged father – an academic of high regard despite his penchant for sleeping with his students, consoling his grown daughter through marriage problems, being temporary separated from his wife, who is out of town for a job interview, and a handful of other side issues, and Straight Man turns into a hysterical page turner. Oh, he also threatens on Live TV to kill a duck a day until his department receives a budget. Just awesome all over here. Read it. Trust me.

Up next: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

NYC Midnight: Twelve Floors

Group 74

A Ghost Story

A Stairwell

A Hamburger

Brief Synopsis: After a séance brings back an evil spirit, Darcy must flee down twelve floors as her possessed friend gives chase. Her attempted escape turns into a fight for her sanity

Twelve floors. Darcy was sure that’s how many floors she and Casey climbed just minutes earlier. A lump formed in her throat thinking of her best friend. Until now. Until that damned spirit called back to this world by that witch had scooped out the soul of her friend and claimed the remaining shell as its own.

Bam! Bam! A fist pounded on the door behind Darcy. She stumbled forward, finding the railing in the stairwell despite the only illumination being a strobing red light as if a police cruiser was chasing a speeder somewhere above.

“We’re a little old for hide-and-seek, don’t you think?” Casey shouted. “I like it better when we play doctor! Show me where it hurts, Darc.”

“SHUT UP!” She screamed. “You’re not Casey!”

She descended the concrete stairway before her, knowing that after eight steps she’d reach a landing. There the stairway turned for another eight steps before coming to a landing and a door for the floor below. One hundred and ninety-two steps to freedom.

“That’s not nice. We were married in blood. Don’t you remember your vows?” The door’s hinges creaked as it opened behind her.

“I remember it was rainy and muddy and creepy that day,” she yelled back. His interest in the occult was alluring to her once, but over the last few months she regretted ever indulging his dark fantasies, most of all the pagan wedding. Yet she conceded to his desire to meet the witch in this abandoned high rise for the séance, as if appeasing him this time would save their relationship. She felt like the British in the 1930s, begrudgingly making concessions to the Nazis right up to the point the tanks rolled into Poland.

She reached the first landing, pivoted her weight and continued down the next flight. Her heart raced and her twenty-two-year old lungs burned. Too many smokes.

Casey’s voice called out.

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”

They shared both an admiration of T.S. Eliot and a history of various psychological maladies, making “The Waste Land” their favorite. The poem served almost as a talisman in their relationship, pulling them back from the brink of every drama.

“Come in under the shadow of this red rock…”

Darcy risked taking two steps at a time, hoping the distance would muffle his voice.

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

“SHUT UP!” she screamed again, as she neared the seventh floor.

“Darcy. That is no way to talk to your friend.”

In the pulsating red light on the landing, her father stood behind a charcoal grill. He wore an old blue cap and a white apron with “Caution Man Cooking” written across it in a font made to resemble flames.

“I hear he wants to play doctor. Don’t blow this, you’re a cute girl, but looks won’t last forever. Better bag him while you still can.” 

“Daddy?” Tears welled in her eyes. She hadn’t seen him since that day twelve years earlier when a Mack truck T-boned his Corvette on his way to pick her up at her friend’s house.

“Hurry up and apologize, your burger is almost done.” He lifted a patty with his spatula, and even from feet away, she could see maggots crawling on the pink beef.

“You’re not real.” She rushed passed him, catching a glimpse of the left side of his face and the mangled soup of muscle, flesh, and bone that remained after the accident.

“You’ve always been a disappointment,” he said. “You know right as that truck hit me, the last thing I thought was that this is all Darcy’s fault.”

Salty tears stung her eyes, and her dad started singing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Casey’s voice interjected with more lines from Eliot. The last six floors were a blur, the sounds mixing with the strobing light. 

She came to the final landing where there was only a door. Silence echoed behind her, she couldn’t even hear Casey’s footfalls descending the stairs. Perhaps, he gave up. She tried the door, but it didn’t budge. Casey had told her only the doors to the floors were locked. She dug into her purse for the key Casey had stored there. He detested carrying things in his pockets. The key fit the lock, the door clicked, and she plunged through.

Her heart plummeted to her stomach. She expected to find the lobby, but instead she was greeted by the twelfth-floor hallway. Two doorways to her left, candlelight flickered into the hallway.

“This isn’t possible.”

Her feet carried her to the open door, and inside, they remained seated in a circle. The demon spirit with horns, a bull’s snout, and blazing red pupils wore Casey’s clothes, and the witch was no longer a gray-haired woman but a giant python with two feeble long arms. Two other grotesque minions were also there.

“Come, Darcy,” Casey said. “Let’s consummate our bond. Waiting will only make this more painful.”

She wailed, her last shreds of sanity spilling out in high octave notes. She retreated back to the stairway, where she ran down and down and down and down.

***

“You think she’s possessed,” said the witch, who was really no more than an old woman named Kara.

“No, but I’m worried,” Casey said. “She’s had episodes before, but never for this long. We should call for help.”

“Shit, if the cops are coming, I need to hide a few things,” Kara struggled to her feet. Casey dug into Darcy’s purse for her cell phone.

Across the room, Darcy kept stomping in eight-step triangles. Her eyes were distant and wild, and she murmured lines of Eliot and fragments of old songs. As Casey dialed, he made out one line.

“I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing looking into the heart of light, the silence.” 

Red’s Book Review: Emily, Alone by Stewart O’Nan

I finished this book at about 4 A.M. the other day as a cold refused to let me get some sleep. The setting fit the mood of the book, a look into the isolation of the elderly in our society. Emily, a widower, lives alone and is confronting both her own mortality and the solitude created by her ever-diminishing social circle. With this book coming from Emily’s perspective, it provides an accurate depiction of the clash of beliefs and styles between generations. Emily has a contentious relationship with her two children and longs to have a closer relationship with all her grandchildren. I think when you’re young it’s hard to understand that perspective, and it becomes difficult to imagine why a grandparent worries about this or that. I think this book lifts that vale.

Up Next: Straight Man by Richard Russo

Red’s Book Reviews: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

With the backdrop of the plight of the Monarch Butterfly, Kingsolver weaves a tale that intermingles the behavior of insects to a changing environment and the behavior of humans reacting to their environment. The main character is Dellarobia, a young wife and mother struggling in her marriage, her career (or lack thereof), and her place within in her husband’s family. A major theme being the role of conversation. The mystery of how Monarch’s communicate with one another to continue and change their yearly migrations. The communication that happens and doesn’t happen within a family and how that influences behavior. The bigger scope conversation between scientists and the public, as one side thumps the climate change narrative to a population that greatly ignores it. It’s hard to sum up a Kingsolver book in so few sentences because she is always so nuanced in making her points. I recommend this one, and recommend pretty much all of her books.

Up next: Emily, Alone by Stewart O’Nan.

NYC Midnight Flash Fiction: Paint Paradise in a Parking Lot

Group - 74 - Romance/An Electric Car Charging Station/A tote bag

Brief Synopsis: Sarah Dowdy hopes painting a parking space will inspire her rural town to think green. As it turns out, it inspires much more than that.

Dairy De-Lite Manager Daisy Farris ordered the installation of the first electric car charging station in Lincoln in the fall of 2014 per company mandate received via an official memo emailed to her company account. By May, the dang thing was placed before the stall next to the handicap spots on the west side of the building

Then no one used it the next three years.

You must remember that in Lincoln the population of full-sized diesel trucks still somehow manages to outnumber the actual population about two to one. Gas mileage and saving the earth are pretty low on the priority list of the average Lincolnite. Way below the weather, which most speculate about in every conversation.

“Dang it, it’s hot! Been pissin’ on my crops to keep them growing.”

“Lordy, when will it stop rainin’? Woke up dis mornin’ and my heifers were doin’ cannonballs in the feed lot.”

“Never been this frosty in May, I say. Still leery of unhitchin’ my snow blade.”  

Connecting the dots between their beloved gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive steeds and absurd weather occurrences was not in the activity book of their minds. That’s how things are in Lincoln, U.S.A. That’s how folks say it around these parts, Lincoln, U.S.A.

Not all of the town was ignorant to the climate change cause. Sarah Dowdy was an exception. Boy, was she ever. Born in 1999, three decades too late for the hippie movement, Ms. Dowdy loved tie-dyed, braiding her straight blonde hair, and walking around with no shoes on, and she lugged a huge tote bag everywhere filled with art supplies, hair ties, and sticks of incense. On the side of the tote in rainbow letters it said, “Recycling Rules!” Sarah Dowdy believed that small statements make big differences.

Ms. Dowdy turned that glorious age of sixteen in June of 2015, and she noticed the charging station when she drove her daddy in his big Chevy to the Dairy De-Lite after passing her driving test. She asked about it and old Ross Dowdy whistled between his clenched teeth.

“Nothing but some tree huggers with silly ideas,” Ross said, wanting more than anything to avoid the conversation and get to his chocolate dip cone. Ross, you see, owns four gasoline stations in the region. Gas efficiency definitely isn’t a priority.

Sarah Dowdy’s interest wasn’t so easily dismissed. By God, Google was made for finding out about things, and before she knew it, she loved electric cars. The charging station, she realized, was a tiny symbol of change in Lincoln. It just needed some help.

“I can make a difference,” she proclaimed one day to her best friend, Sophie, a chubby shy creature with braces. Sophie nodded and shrugged, a gesture as encouraging as it was confusing.

A night later, she snuck out of the house and hoofed it to the Dairy De-Lite parking lot. Late night Lincoln was quiet. A single police car patrolled for an hour or so before parking beside the highway allowing the deputy to nap between the occasional approaching headlights.

Sarah’s bulging tote was filled with spray paint cans. She came alone, Sophie being too timid for such rebellion, and she came determined.

The parking lot had its own set of lights and the charging station was thankfully blocked from the view of passing traffic by the building. She admired her canvas a moment, the rectangle blacktop of the car stall in front of the station while shaking a can of green paint. A muse tickled her imagination and she began painting. First with green. Grass, plants, and such. Then blue for sky, and once the blue dried, yellow for a bold sun and white for a fluffy cloud. Brown. Orange. Purple. She worked so feverishly she didn’t notice the shadow looming over her until it spoke.

“They’ll tan your hide for this.”

She jumped up, swirling to meet her intruder and hatching a plan to spray him in the eyes if rape was on his mind. He stepped back, flicking a cigarette away. Allan Schuld flipped burgers for minimum wage at the Dairy De-Lite during the summer. He was a year older than Sarah, and she remembered him from gym class, awkward with gangly limbs yet surprisingly athletic. He still donned the pink t-shirt and black slacks of the De-Lite uniform spotted with the obligatory stains and sweat spots. Below that was the dictionary definition of an average American boy.

“What are you doing sneaking up on me?”

“I left my jacket inside and they gave me a key this summer, so I walked over. What are you doing?”

“Making a statement.”

“Looks like you’re painting a parking spot.”

“It’s a statement about supporting the earth.”

“Hmm, well I hope it dries before it rains.”

He disappeared into the restaurant, returning a few moments later.

In the meantime, she painted an arrow on the sidewalk toward the charging station and one pointing to the mural in the parking space. Between the arrows were the words, “This saves this!”

“I like it,” he smiled, “Say, how far away do you live?”

“A couple miles, why?”

“Mind if I walk you home.”

She nodded and shrugged, borrowing Sophie’s non-committal gesture. He took it as a yes, and it didn’t take long for her to convince him to support the charging station, almost as fast as it took for him to fall for her.

The rest of the walk was cliché. Shining stars, a dark sky, a cool breeze, an offered jacket. Yes, cliché, but that’s Lincoln, U.S.A.

Love accompanied them from then on and that love inspired change.

Let’s paint the picture. Three years later. An electric car. The same charging station, finally being used. A late summer night. An engagement ring. A kiss. An embrace. A new mural painted by the happy couple to replace the one lost by a lot resurfacing.

The result: three more couples in Lincoln bought electric cars within the next six months.

Sarah Dowdy’s statement made a difference.