From "Natalie Schervo Speaking"

This is an excerpt from a larger work. Perhaps a forthcoming larger work. Perhaps not. Only time and all that ... 

After the phone call, she had begun to wonder if her mother had always carried that insanity with her or if it had come upon her suddenly, like a fever, a rush of blood to the head, just a momentary lapse in judgment.

“She burned her home down,” the man said, so matter-of-factly, so lifelessly, as if crazy women had been burning their own homes down since the dawn of time, “We’re going to need to you to come down here and answer some questions for us.”

Well, could answer some questions for me? she thought. She thought but didn’t say. Her outbursts had gotten her in trouble before. Typically, the problems arose when she was in high school, like the time she shouted at Mrs. Mitchell, her history teacher, who insinuated that Natalie might have been a house slave, a product of rape, during the early nineteenth century. Since then, she had undergone counseling and could now repress the urge to shout, how about I burn your house down, when the man-robot asked her to drive down to her mother’s home, asking if she needed the address as if she hadn’t been stepping through those doors for more than twenty years of her life. Instead, she walked to Tim’s office, politely explained why she needed to leave early today, and hopped into her beat up Pontiac Sunfire, staring at the Real Girls Hotline office building as if it might suddenly combust.

All the Ways to Say Goodbye

"Listen to the end, dear.

            I can feel your heart pounding; yes, I can. I can hear the thud, thud, thud beating against my face and shaking the very core of my being. I know that you keep your phone tucked beside your breast, often having a difficult time freeing it from your chest’s viper-like grip once the vibration starts and you, too, begin to feel the cadence of my heart mingling with yours. I can feel your heart pounding, dancing with the maniacal rhythm of a third grader with a metal can strapped to his chest and a piece of wood in either hand, and the song gives me pause, beckons me back to days when the sun was just a little higher in the sky and the moon, just a little lower.

            Do not ask how you know me. There isn’t enough time. Let the rhythm take you instead. Let it move you as those old pop songs of the eighties and nineties once commanded. Yes, dear, let it free your mind, for what I have to tell you may not sit well if not properly prepared.