Thirty Nine Hirschsprung Street

(part the eleventh of "Dreams Can Come True In Thirty Five Minutes")

As the opening refrain of "Soul Man" played over the parking lot's loudspeakers, Katja couldn't help shifting uncomfortably in her seat. The crow's nest of the crane had been extended to its fullest, sitting an unmodest seventy-five feet above the ground, and as the reigning Miss Wisconsin waved to the mallgoers, she felt a wave of nausea flow through her.

It wasn't just her petrifying fear of heights, either. (Growing up less than a few hundred feet from a radioactive waste disposal site, she had plenty of encounters with giant mutated crows, who -with their poor eyesight - would often mistake her for Rudyard Kipling, and therefore would grab her by the scruff of what little neck she had and carry her to their nests in the peaks of the Bucegi or the Baiu.) No, twelve years of hypnotherapy and biweekly visits to the pudding immersement chamber had cured her of that affliction. This nausea was caused by the song.

The memories washed over her like a flood of warm, rancid mayonaise, and she felt quite literally pulled in by the undertow of her past. She had come to this country as a mail-order bride, as many Romanian women do, and try as she might, she will never be able to free herself from the shackles of her memory of that one night at 39 Hirschsprung St.

Ted meant well, he really did. Katja knew that, and harbored no ill will towards him. (In fact, she would later find out that the broccoli that was mysteriously delivered to the 1993 Ford Windstar she had been living out of every hour for three days following her victory in the pageant was his way of saying "I knew you could do it.")

But when she first arrived at his home to find him wearing nothing but his Bobby Vinton mask, with clam purée slathered all over his naked body, playing the classic Otis Redding song at 3/4 speed and thrusting himself into a bicycle tire's inner tube...Katja found herself unable to contain her emotions and she collapsed into the fetal position on his lawn, where she would remain for five weeks. Ted, not knowing exactly what to do with a paralyzed mail-order bride, placed a birdbath on her back, and fed her fairly regularly until she recovered.

For this she was thankful.