THEY COULDN’T HAVE PICKED A WORSE place to meet. I find them drawing maps and making lists. Maude and Tut are waiting for me, dressed all in black, idling in the parking lot behind the McDonald’s. Their usual alley is too crowded now that all the good murals have materialized along its bricks. Getting over there’s a big hassle, so we had to pick a new location. Nobody knows what goes on behind this building, especially not us. Looks like it’s mostly dumpsters and weeds and tall grass filled with ticks bigger than the extra value menu out here.

This is about the time my neighbor Quinn is supposed to die. She says if you don’t smell spaghetti sauce cooking from out in the hallway by her door, then she’s probably dead and I need to force my way into her apartment. Need to find her stack of notebooks underneath her bed and burn them out in the courtyard. We made a pact. Quinn always tells me about her medical history in great detail. And she always asks how I’m doing while she’s closing her door.

As I assess the situation, Maude rummages through the glove compartment and finds everything but gloves.

“Don’t go shuffling things around in there without looking. That’s how I lost my first finger,” Tut says.

His voice dips twice as low when he speaks to women he finds attractive.

For some reason, Maude makes a note of his admonition in her file. She uses a manila envelope filled with loose-leaf, college-ruled, three-ring-binder paper.

It’s not hard to execute a plan unless a committee is involved. That’s what led to the downfall of my last secret society. Maude, Tut, and I have an understanding.

At first, Tut was a threat to respectable citizens everywhere. He’s lived as a Mexican bullfighter, a foreign dignitary, and a failed bank robber. And that’s just the stuff he admits to. But his former lifestyles left him lonely. That is until he realized the only cure was sacrifice. Since then his sole recourse is to commit acts of service for the entire community under cover of night. You could say he once moved in certain circles, and now he’s trying to move in rectangles and triangles and things like that.

But you need to know that Tut deserves whatever he gets, regardless of his change in behavior.

“Here. Don’t lose this,” Tut says, handing me a key.

I marsupial it into my sweatshirt pouch.

Today’s operation is delivering casseroles devoid of color and otherwise unexceptional to old people who’ve had their licenses revoked.

I get in. We screech past my favorite city dump and the dollar store, making record time. Anything slower and Tut wouldn’t go for it. He’s got beef with Meals on Wheels. I won’t get into what happened, but let’s just say he’s never gotten past it.

My neighbor Quinn’s apartment is quiet when I return. Dangerously quiet.

I stoop down and sniff, hunting for any remainders of Italian seasoning, but I can only detect the hallway carpet’s typical musk.

So I bust down her door. I really put my shoulder into it.

I enter the apartment but the apartment is really a lair. Quinn’s on her loveseat with a phone up to her ear.

“Yeah, well, she planted that evidence. Listen, I gotta go. They’re calling me into the operating room right now.”

Quinn hangs up and looks at me like she’s in some sort of trance even though she was just on the phone. I don’t know what to make of it.

She has a sexy pinup calendar of sandwiches tacked to the wall.

I sit down beside her. The loveseat’s size and shape make us lean into each other no matter how many times we adjust.

“I thought you were—”

“Don’t get excited. It’s not my day of reckoning quite yet. But clearly you’re prepared,” she says.

Quinn gets up and guides me over to the kitchen. There’s a tiny archway carved into the floorboard as if she’s constructed a home for cartoon mice.

“You see that? I did that,” she says. “You never know.”

There’s a safe across the room. I wonder what she keeps in there, wonder why she never mentioned me handling anything in there when she dies, or why the doomed notebooks under her bed aren’t stored inside. This mystery—it’s the source of her power.

If she sees me flipping through every month of her sandwich calendar she doesn’t say anything.

“Now that you’re not dying, do you want to teach me how to cook?”

“I can’t. I’m getting knighted later,” she says.

Last week I caught Quinn dangling from a tree beside the courtyard, unleashing a series of vowels in the form of a scream. I couldn’t get anything out of her besides the screaming for about ten minutes. I thought she'd be embarrassed but she was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. Like nothing ever happened.

I leave her be, stepping over what’s left of her front door, and retreat to the city dump.

I sit atop my garbage hill whenever I see fit. The dump has smells, like most dumps do, but I’m starting to like the view. Maude and Tut know perfectly well where to find me. I’m thinking about how Quinn might be a symptom of the apocalypse when they pick me up for our next scheme. We’re taking knitting lessons, devising specialized sweaters for the homeless.

“Are you writing this down? Tut asks Maude, even though we were all perfectly silent. •




Claire Hopple is the author of seven books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Wigleaf, Forever Mag, Little Engines, Cleveland Review of Books, and others.

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