The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffrey Ford Page B

a delicate dragonfly, which she had purchased years before with her first paycheck from her first job. Every month she would perform the ritual of dusting each piece with a small chamois cloth the size of four postage stamps. During one of the dustings, the dragonfly slipped from her hand and smashed into slivers against the hardwood floor. Her reaction only lasted a moment, but there were tears in her eyes, and a small, muffled sound of anguish escaped from her mouth. Years later I interrupted her once when she was staring into the empty center of the zoo. Her eyes were unusually vacant and her lips slightly parted.
    My mother-in-law’s cold nature has had an adverse affect on both her husband and children. The children are all grown now, married, and live on their own, but she keeps all four of them trapped tightly in orbit around her. It is her fuming silence—her never-voiced but obvious disapproval—that works the trick for her. My wife has been in therapy for some time now, trying to figure out how to please her. The eldest son is a live wire of nerves. He can’t leave anything alone. If he develops a wart on his foot, he must dig at it with an X-acto blade. My wife’s older sister seeks solace in status, and veils the disappointments of the past in catalog silks and designer sunglasses. The baby brother has become a cop who, when confronted with emotional situations, stares silently into the distance. All of them are tight with a dollar. All of them can spot a garage-sale sign while doing sixty on a busy road. She does not approve of their marriage partners or the way they are raising their children. It is hard to tell how much responsibility Dorothy can claim for her husband’s dark mood. At one time, he had been creative, an artist who had attained some level of recognition. Now he is a grouch who can barely lift a paintbrush without cursing his very existence. Because of her scorn for naps, he sleeps until noon every day. Then he has lunch and works until after dinner when he begins on the martinis. Each night, he sits in his chair in the den, gazing listlessly at the television while flipping through the forty-six channels, trying to find some soft-core porn that will take him through the night. When you ask him how it’s going, his only reply is, “Grim.”
    In times of crisis, the mind of the woman who counts her breath runs flawlessly, as if filled with the whirring gears of a Swiss watch instead of the usual, easily flustered gray matter. Her solution to most problems is to restore order at any cost and then mete out a swift, harsh punishment to the responsible individual or individuals. There is no such thing as an accident to our subject; even the inherent chaos of normal change has a culprit lurking behind it, more often than not a member of some minority. Occasionally, she feels it necessary to remind even Nature that she will not tolerate any monkey business.
    My wife’s younger brother told me that one night he discovered a raccoon inside a garbage can and was quick enough to trap it by slamming the lid down tightly and placing a large brick on top. Just then, as if she knew she was needed, Dorothy appeared in her nightgown. Assessing the situation with a look that might have cracked rock, she immediately began barking orders. “Get me a light,” she said. “Go to the laundry room and bring me a bottle of Clorox and a bottle of ammonia.” When he returned, he found that she had taken a ski pole from her collection of junk in the garage and punctured a hole in the top of the plastic garbage can. For some reason, she was also wearing a black ski glove on the hand she used to grasp the pole. He was ordered to hold the light above and behind her, and was admonished when its beam strayed from the opening she had made. “Ammonia,” she said like a surgeon demanding a scalpel. Her son handed it over. The entire bottle was emptied into the hole. The