The Lemon Thief's Ex-Wife's Third Cousin

Chapter Two

Of course, when he had lived there as a child, the town was not called Misterlittleton, nor did all its streets begin with such appellations. All that had changed much later, after the great event which had left the city floundering and desperate for desperate measures. It had been simply Littleton back then, and his family had lived at 75 Harrison Street, Misterharrison Street by now, no doubt. Hernan had often thought of what a blessing it had been when his father had been transferred from the former brewery outpost there to the main factory along the Wetford waterfront. They had missed the mega-storm which had virtually wiped Littleton off the map by utterly decimating its downtown and ruining its formerly boisterous port trade. The cruise ships had redirected themselves downriver, along with every other tourist-oriented and industrial business. The storm had been so destructive, and the consequent bills so high, that the insurance companies which had underwritten everything and everybody there had gone belly up, leaving the entire region in the hands of the city council. It was in order to avoid further liabilities and cancel any and all existing legal contracts that the council had renamed the town and every single street within it, settling on the convenient method of pre-pending them all with a handful of easy and memorable prefixes. As the council at the time was dominated by members of the PFR party (whose letters stood for Post-Feminist Redemption), it was doubly convenient to name everything in such a way as to call attention to the patriarchal origins of this, and most every other, locale in the world. So it was Misterlittleton now, and Misterharrison Street, and number 44 Misteranibal Street towards which the postcard was now directing Hernan's attention. Hernan had heard about all of the radical developments in his home town over the years but paid no more attention to them than if they had been happening halfway across the planet instead of a mere few hundred miles away. He had never seriously considered re-visiting the place, and now he had to ask himself why that was.

There had been another side to the family's relocation, he recalled. Not everyone had been thrilled about it. The fact was, his mother had not wanted to move at all, and this was probably the main factor leading to their subsequent divorce. She had moved back there not much later. He had stubbornly taken his father's side in the matter, and had not even once seen his mother since then, in now nearly thirty years! It must have been a pretty bitter divorce, as nasty as his own was to be another fifteen years later. He'd heard that she remarried and even had another child, a half-brother much younger than himself, a half-brother he'd never met and whose name he couldn't recall. Strange how much can pivot on a single event! Hernan had never given much thought to it. Now he could remember the fights, the yelling, those dark days when, as the only child and the center of every struggle, he had fruitlessly willed himself invisible but had managed at most to shut out the bad feelings that were resurfacing in volume right there in the parking lot. He tried to shake them out of his hair and walked back to my house, where he made himself a cup of peppermint tea and proceeded to show me the postcard and tell me all about it.

"You've got to go," I told him when he'd caught me up. "That much is obvious." He was sitting in my own favorite chair, still holding the postcard and turning it over and over in his hand, as if he was going to see something on it he'd somehow missed the first few thousand times.

"No way," he protested, standing up out of his seat and nearly spilling his tea. "That's the last thing I want to do."

"Aw, come on," I said, "it'll be fun. I'll go with you. I've always wanted to see Misterlittleton. There's been some amazing stuff going on over there. It's weird how we never went before." I was serious. Some things you see on TV and read about for years and yet it never occurs to you to go and see for yourself. A lot of kooky stuff had been written about that place. I'd just assumed most of it was lies. Was it true they had this law where all the buildings had to be completely redesigned, if not outright torn down and rebuilt, every decade or so? Ridiculous, but a lot of people said it was true, even more people than believed in Bigfoot or reptilian aliens among us.

"I'm not going," he insisted, but of course we went, otherwise there'd be nothing else to tell you about.