Leaning against the locked door that led back down to her apart-
ment, Shifra counted out slices of bread. All her bread accounted for, she
loaded and unloaded her staplegun a few times. It worked as well as the day
she bought it. Only a bored sigh from Alvin kept her from unspooling and
measuring any of the thread.
	"WHAT?" she protested. "The number of useful things in this bag
will shock you, if you let it. We'll both be fat, and happy, and rich."
	Alvin sank to his knees and rocked back to sit on his heels. "I
will wait, " he said, "until it becomes clear this is not merely a feint."
Shifra rolled her eyes.
	Hours earlier, just before noon, they had watched molasses pour
down the street outside Rat Race Pets. Shifra, behind the counter, busied
herself trying to stay out of her boss's way. She noticed a note of resig-
nation in Alvin's reaction as he watched his car borne away on the sticky
tide. He wasn't cowering like the other customers. For this, she had led
him upstairs to prospective freedom.

	As evening fell, she was losing patience. "You may see this as you
getting victimized," she said to a stolid Alvin, "but the police will want
to talk to you when they find out your wife did this."
	He smirked. "Like, I thought she was kidding. Right? 'I never sus-
pected she was capable of this, officer.' I don't have much choice in how I
play it. Do you expect to be accountable to the police anyway? You look
like you're ready to barter your way through a few years of anarchy."
	The distilling apparatus was a few minutes away from producing a
powerful caustic, and Shifra pretended not to have fully heard him over the
clink of glassware.

	Kilroy-like, Alvin peered over the dege of the roof. Molasses mur-
mured and thrummed below him. The same atavism that always gripped him in
high places urged him to jump, to sink into the molasses or, if he was
lucky, to walk a mile on its viscous surface until he reached his home. He
tossed a peanut down and it sank instantly, blooping down to street level.
	He turned around to see Shifra raising a beaker to the fading light
of the sun. "Aqua regia," she declared.
	Alvin's thoughts were elsewhere. "It was not wifely of her. This
flood simply has no context within our marriage. I'll look elsewhere for
meaning."
	Shifra pressed the beaker on him. "HERE. If you're going to run
from the law, you'll want to get rid of your fingerprints."
	He had no intention of doing so, but accepted her gift to be
polite. She asked his name again and he said, "My name has been taken from
me. I am molasses now."
	Shifra could see them already cleaning the streets across town, but
didn't know whether this called for her to correct him.

written for G.A. Carafelli at my kitchen table 10/6/01

I should have known better than to use that pet store again. I like this a little better than #14, but it's capricious in an un-fun way and ultimately plotless. On the up-side, I'm finding it easier to come up with sentences that don't all have exactly the same structure, and I think this may have the most even mix yet of dialogue and prose. (Not that having precisely 50% dialogue is a particular goal of mine, but I worry that I pig out on it sometimes and ignore it other times.)

G.A. requested this story "on the occasion of my weekend visit to Boston", and so I threw in my favorite piece of Boston's past, the Molasses Flood of 1919.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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