The following is excerpted from the story of a young girl detective, one Clovis Cassidy, who’s primary jurisdiction lies in crimes of neglect. When a classmate goes missing, unnoticed, in a small town where baby food is the major source of employment, Cassidy is on the case. Mysterious and bizarre elements surround the young girl’s disappearance, including a feral family who’s only order of the day appears to be chaos, a patriarch obsessed with all things Shakespearian, and a curious Lazyboy recliner that may well just be the source of the crime. Not your-regular-Bobsi Twin, not you average-Nancy-come lately-Drew, Cassidy is hard on the trail. Nevertheless one must ask, how will Clovis Cassidy, kid detective, get herself out of this pickle?

Precocious. (adj) As in her mother’s thumb, from which she saw it sucked out, greedily. Pulling the marrow of the word between the teeth. You precocious little bitch, she said (after what kind of incident/accident?). Uttered with foreboding and double meaning by her mother, later a schoolteacher, then a relative, or a stranger; used indiscriminately to describe her behavior, her vocabulary, her manner of dress, her intellect at large. As if the simple addition of a C and an O could occupy a word, like a squatter, forging the former residence into a halfway home. Steal between the letters, post-date itself, wipe out its precious (as in valued/as in affected) existence.

The following is excerpted from the story of a young girl detective, one Clovis Cassidy, who’s primary jurisdiction lies in crimes of neglect. When a classmate goes missing, unnoticed, in a small town where baby food is the major source of employment, Cassidy is on the case. Mysterious and bizarre elements surround the young girl’s disappearance, including a feral family who’s only order of the day appears to be chaos, a patriarch obsessed with all things Shakespearian, and a curious Lazyboy recliner that may well just be the source of the crime. Not your-regular-Bobsi Twin, not you average-Nancy-come lately-Drew, Cassidy is hard on the trail. Nevertheless one must ask, how will Clovis Cassidy, kid detective, get herself out of this pickle?

Interlude

Now she gathers the children around the King Richards. See, she says, how even as they fall from the King’s shoulders, how they are laid out splendidly? See how when a thing falls from the King’s shoulders it does not fall as a leaf does from a tree, scattered with other leaves, but falls JUST SO.