The Multi-genre Mashup SmackDown

Hatchet Street, Sacramento

At the front desk of LackLuster Law and Legal Advice in Sacramento, she gave her name "Chloridia, the H is silent."

The secretary lowered their pen and then lifted it in a dipping motion. "Would you mind printing your name for us? Legal documents cannot have errors, and just as a precaution. I mean if you ask me, the legal process creates plenty of waste with advertisements, drafting agreements, copies for clients, inheritors, parents, children, grandparents, godparents, bosses, employees, jury's, judges, police officers, neighbors, witnesses, news outlets, in the end it all adds up to a mass of–"

"Trees."

With a single nod and a labored breath, the secretary slid a legal pad and a charcoal pen across the desk.

Chloridia glanced past the secretary, tracking the sun, it barely lowered in the September sky. She bent her knees slightly, sliding a pair of dark shades down the bridge of her nose. She stared into the blazing ball of light, while a fraction of a smile shadowed her lips. Her irises bloomed, burnt, and roasted like a pork loin, until she returned the sunglasses to their proper position.

The secretary didn't catch the silent exchange, but could smell something off putting–akin to rotting wood as Chloridia pulled a plastic pen from her own pouch.

The secretary blundered a response, fumbling with the rejected pen and in a move of social unrest, they chucked the pen through an open window far right. It pierced the windshield of an ambulance carrying a local author turned redneck. "I used to feel remorse for using so much paper." The secretary pointed to the piles below their feet, the stacks used as door jams, the folders strewn in tacky waiting room chairs. "You see, when I was hired, this place was like an empire. In my first week, I placed a recycling bin in the hallway. I felt righteous, I thought I could make a difference in this ominous dominion. After one year, I started drinking old fashioneds, and smoked anything I could get my hands on'' the secretary snapped–it was a sharp snap "and then I had an incident with a Lutheran bishop."

Chloridia nearly filled the entire line as the secretary drolled. Her smile faded as she extended the line, unfortunately, the olive ink bled through when she initialed her last name.

The secretary licked their fingers and picked up the document. They drug their thumb across the ink smudge on the desk and sucked it off their skin. They lifted the sheet to their nostrils and inhaled–more precisely they snorted the fresh ink with hooded lids, like a cosmic vacuum cleaner hovering atop a pile of rice.

The secretary swayed, "The property is on Hatchet Street."

Chloridia's shoulders froze–going rigid. Her hand planted on the door handle.

The secretary spoke again, "You've forgotten a complimentary map."

She twisted the brass knob, "I'm sure I'll find my way."

While Chloridia stepped into a yellow taxi cab with an expired license plate heading northbound, Reedgrass Shepherd whacked at a Fremont Cottonwood sapling by an abandoned truck stop just off Lemon Hill. His 16 year old self would be proud of his swing.

Reedgrass had illicitly read the private listing on his father–the mayor's computer, and under lock and key, spoke to the executor of his family trust when he'd heard the news. The property befallen to him had been a yarn shop, restored into a fondue company which went out of business when the owner's son married a blueberry farmer and took off to Vermont with the family pearls. It was then recaptured by the state of California and forty eight years later finally repurchased, by his grandmother, a candle collector, who passed away in August from a lobster bisque poisoning.

He swung with veracity into the tree trunk and the ax dug into dry bark. A rip split the tree. Although, above the sound of cracking wood, his phone buzzed; it was an incessant buzz. He lifted the telephone to his ear, "SOn, DiD yOU BrIng ThE MicROwaVe?"