Paul’s flight to Bulgaria was an absolute nightmare. The security line was excruciatingly long, and the strip search was conducted by an elderly man who took every one of his life’s disappointments, from the time in third grade when nobody invited him to their birthday parties because he wasn’t a very nice person to the fact that his ex-wife and children no longer spoke to him because he wasn’t a very nice person, out on the poor figures who slumped through his line.

Returning to the office deflated everyone. The building still seemed stable, and HR Manager Candice Smythe-Guggenpopper Fantasy desperately tried to inflict high spirits on everyone. “A publisher isn’t the magazines it publishes!” she rallied. “It’s the people!” She, of course, had finagled a 22% raise due to her “leadership” during these challenging times, so it was easy for her to behave as if she were taking amphetamines.

Work was harder than ever, and not in a good way. The complete inability to get a functional printer meant that Paul Nickels had to do all of his copy-editing on mimeographed pages, with their easily smudged text, paper-thin paper that ripped easier than a virgin’s hymen, and lavender hue that made it almost impossible to tell a colon from an umlaut.

Paul was in a cranky mood. Southeast Haberdasher was in terrible shape. It always had issues with hyphens and en dashes, but this week’s issue was beyond the pale. Even if you ignored that the lead feature was about a hatmaker in Cape Hatteras, Maine (misspelled as “Main”), the proprietor’s name changed from Elsa to Elbert within the space of a pull quote, and the phone number given for their preferred supplier of tailor’s chalk actually went to a bowling alley in Xenia, Ohio.

Tallulah had a chess tournament. She was quite good, having taken up the sport as a young girl as a sanctuary against the ravages of growing up in Ohio. Over time she had come to appreciate its symbolism: The power of a lonely, stoic queen, the seemingly random but actually ordered behavior of a knight, the crookedness of the bishops. Paul played only occasionally, and his skills were clearly amateurish, but he certainly appreciated when a master like Tallulah gave him a good rooking.

Floyd’s proclamation left Paul dumbfounded for two and a half full minutes. Sure, new experiences could expand and perhaps even shift a person’s sexual preferences and orientation, but being gay wasn’t something to be “cured,” nor was such a cure possible in any real sense. Whatever had happened to Floyd—and judging by the blood that trickled from so many areas of his body, it couldn’t have been pleasant—it was not an honest discovery but rather brainwashing.

The black van was parked just in front of the gate. A shiftless-looking man yanked his feet off the dashboard when he realized people were approaching. He stepped out of the van. “Is it time for me to collect the…” Wendy aimed a vicious strike at his windpipe, rendering him silent and, very shortly thereafter, unconscious. “I train in Krav Maga.

Paul decided to keep some distance from Martin for the night, at least. He meandered to the mess hall where dinner would be served, followed by several hours of tedious administrative work to sign necessary death indemnity forms and be shouted at about how masculinity has been neutered in the modern world, and a concluding sing-a-long of Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” before an 8 p.m.

Paul waved goodbye to Genevieve and Wendy as they pulled away in a cloud of dust that the semi kicked up from the side of the driveway. He gave some consideration to Genevieve’s final words. Her clitoris may have been permanently damaged in the rodeo accident, but perhaps her other erogenous zones could experience delayed but equally intense pleasure, the way someone who loses their vision develops an extra-powerful libido to compensate.

When Paul and Wendy recovered, everything came into sharp focus. They were somewhere in Wyoming, certainly—the in-flight map he had consulted on the airplane convinced Paul of that. But he didn’t know precisely where in Wyoming he was, nor how to get to Red Butte and Camp WuttaButta II. He also didn’t know where Wendy was going. “I live in Casper,” she explained when he inquired.

Eduardo procured an emergency parachute from the crew closet and ably began to attach it to Paul’s back. The straps wrapped around Paul so thoroughly that he felt a bit like he was being tied into one of his bondage rigs at home. He wore the parachute like a backpack, of course, but Eduardo hitched extra safety straps around each armpit, both thighs, his chest, his abdomen, and his waist.

Paul had a lot of experience getting dressed while running and hauling baggage, so he made it to the gate just as the agent was announcing preboarding for members of the military, families with young children, elderly passengers who may need additional time boarding, and copy editors. He zipped his fly and approached the gate with his ticket barcode loaded to his phone.

Paul was always punctual at airports. He was the first in the security line when it opened at 4:30 the next morning. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary—he’d left his apartment within three minutes of rolling out of his bed, and he would have loved to satisfy his hunger with a frittata from his favorite airport-based breakfast joint (Stefani’s on Concourse D, where the bacon was cured with maple, the potatoes were seasoned to perfection with a glorious blend of Himalayan and Mediterranean salt flakes, and the wait staff were clad in sparkly tube tops and booty shorts that drove him wild), but experience had taught him that he’d probably need every minute just to make it to his gate.

The next day, Paul had just sat his bike helmet down when Neil Tarkenov, the publisher of Hamberlin Publishing’s Resorts and Campgrounds division, entered. “How’d you like to go to Wyoming?” Neil asked without preamble. “I’ve heard good things,” Paul said. “Camping. Hiking. Coal mining. Seems like fun.” “Glad to hear you say that,” Neil said. “You’ve got a flight tomorrow at 6:30 a.m.”

By three in the afternoon, Paul was feeling proud of what he’d accomplished. Modern PE Teacher and Poultry Production were both complete to his usual exceptional standard, even though Poultry Production used a bespoke and frankly nonsensical style guide that used a complicated formula involving the tense of the sentence, the ease of translating the sentence into vulgar Latin, and the number of cocks involved in the story to determine whether or not to use the Oxford comma.

Paul Nickels locked his bicycle to the rack outside Hamberlin Publishing’s headquarters building at precisely 9:02 am. “I still can’t get over you biking every day,” taunted Reg Falcon, the company’s pudgy finance officer. “You should learn to drive.” “I know how to drive,” Paul assured him. He started walking, letting Reg think he’d scored a jaguar of a zinger. But when Reg’s smirk had firmly taken hold of his face, Paul spun.

Today, rather than a short snippet read by a household object, I’m happy to share a full chapter from Present Tension, the first book in The Interrobang Chronicles. This is Chapter 2, “…