The ticket machine near the entrance spews small white rectangles imprinted with red numbers. Behind the counter, the five women weave around one another in a silent ballet that belies the frenzy. No one, especially not the customers, is to see just how frenetic the pace is. Boxes are pulled from the stack, folded without even looking, lined with a sheet of waxed paper, and filled with eclairs, Napoleons, streusels, prune danishes, raisin buns with swirls of sugar icing, crumb buns. The variety seems endless.

The main restroom door suctions open. Lucy finishes up and flushes, standing as close to the stall door as possible. A flushed toilet, she has read, can spray a cloud of aerosol droplets three feet in the air. She waits for the woman to slip inside the other stall, but instead hears water running, paper towels yanked out of the dispenser. The woman, she realizes, is crying. Christ, Lucy thinks, how can she get out of here?

I remember the night Stan died because it happened while me and Gert was playing bingo. I picked Gert up at her house like I always do, and after bingo she asked me to come inside, said she wanted to show me the pink toilet paper cover she crocheted for her bathroom. As soon as we walked in the front door, we saw Stan slumped at the dining room table, his bald head face-down in a bowl of chili.

I looked at my buddy, her husband, who sat beside his wife listening as she said “my husband” over and over again, each time not referring to him. He didn’t look angry or hurt, he just sat there, pushing the last vestiges of his meal around his plate, enduring it. I wondered if it was the first time he’d ever heard that story.

Al stared at him. Ray tried to ignore him, but Al didn't look away. Eventually, Ray sighed in defeat and turned to face him. Webs of deep wrinkles framed the sun-baked skin around Al's grey eyes, and a deep frown formed under his unruly beard.

"You didn't come here to sightsee, did you, son?"

Cajun Spice came to a dead stop, which, he kinda sorta had to, if we are being totally honest, what with the road coming to that Dead End like it did, which also, though, surprised him because he’d missed the yellow, diamond, Dead End sign, but also because of the Panther just there, stalking back and forth, in front of the fall-down tree which once probably stood proud in front of Mac-O-Lac’s house there, at the end of the Dead End, which Cajun Spice had had no intention on visiting, but he’d gotten lost, and then there was the panther, so here we are.

I can resist him no longer, so I unlock the attic chamber with a key on a loophole. It dangles like a bell. He neither jumps or starts at my grinning face. He stands chained to the four poster bed, lost and cavernous as a beached ship on unknown shores. This is exactly how I like him.