I want you to know, friends of Untoward, that Bartleby Snopes is hosting a pretty great dialogue fiction contest, which you too could be a part of.

Cody watched an elderly man balance seven cameras as his brood swarmed around Pablo Picasso’s gift to Chicago. At least three generations of this old guy’s family were represented in front of what looked to Cody like a giant horse with one eyeball that contained two pupils. That this horse also had wings and exposed ribs just made it even more surreal. They lined up at its base, and then, like in some existential ballet, they all turned in unison to stare at the old man as he pointed the first camera. The Picasso looked like a monster sneaking up behind them. They couldn’t be happier.

Now I open my mouth and the strange jumbled sounds normally heard on a busy Saturday morning on Somerset Street ripple against my teeth and choke my tongue into new shapes. I promise that if I ask you directions or thank you for change at the cash register and the voice of an eighty year old Chinese woman with only pidgin English at her disposal comes out, I am not making fun of you. Or of ancient Chinese women. Or even myself. You will have to take my word for it.

It doesn’t help that my husband actually is Chinese.

There’s a lot of fun stuff this week to know about and to do. Technically, the culmination of the events listed for this week is an event that is happening next week, Sunday the 14th of August — not to blow your mind chronologically. It’s P. Fanatics: Circle Jerk.

I always spoke by instinct, using whatever came to mind. I had my techniques, of sorts, and a stage. But it’s not the stage that causes fright; it’s the audience. A true audience, I could only guess, must resemble a pack of children and their vicious honesty, leashed by maturity, perhaps, but a single critical voice would cause all to unleash. How fortunate I had been! And now I had an audience and every reason to believe he needed no encouragement to bite.

My baby sister adopted a Russian boy. “You know he’s different,” she told me over the phone. “One of those kids who inspire their parents to commit murder.” This is why she called me; decided it was a fine idea after more than a decade of ignoring my messages, never answering any of my letters; to help her manage this child who was spinning out of control. She’d become fearful, hesitant, the boy had become strange, reticent, and knowing my expertise in the military and CIA, she reached out just when I was wondering whether she had slipped over the edge of the earth.

I wrote down the address on a cocktail napkin as I sipped a Bloody Mary in a rundown tavern halfway across the country.