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pretty good,” he answered.
    “The guy has this dog that he loves and now his ex-wife has the dog and won’t give it back to him. So he asks the main character to steal the dog and bring it to him and he’ll give him five hundred bucks. That’s the conflict. So the main character thinks about it and he goes back and forth and finally, two days later, he calls the guy and tells him he’ll do it.”
    “Uh-oh,” Buster said.
    “I know,” Joseph said, “bad idea. So he breaks into the ex-wife’s house one night and steals the dog but something goes wrong. The dog thinks he’s an intruder, which he is, and starts to attack him, takes a big chunk out of his arm. Well, he manages to get the dog outside and into the car, but when he gets home, he realizes that the dog is dead, that he crushed the dog’s windpipe or something, I wasn’t too specific. Anyways, the dog is dead.”
    “We’re almost there,” Kenny shouted.
    “So the main character takes a shovel and buries the dog in his parents’ backyard. When he’s done, he walks to the bus station, buys a ticket, and gets on a bus without knowing where it’s headed. So he’s on the bus, his arm is bleeding like hell but he’s trying not to let anyone notice, and he hopes that wherever he ends up next will be a good place. That’s the end.”
    “I like it,” Buster said.
    Joseph smiled. “I’m still working on it.”
    “It’s really good, Joseph,” Buster said.
    “I still can’t figure out if it’s a happy ending or a sad ending,” Joseph said.
    “We’re here,” Kenny said, the car coming to an abrupt stop.
    “It’s happy and sad,” Buster said, drifting off. “Most endings are happy and sad at the same time.”
    “You’re going to be okay,” Joseph said.
    “I am?” Buster asked.
    “You’re indestructible,” Joseph said.
    “I’m invincible,” Buster corrected.
    “You’re impervious to pain,” Joseph continued.
    “I’m immortal,” Buster said and then passed out, hoping that wherever he ended up next would be a good place.

a modest proposal, july 1988
    artists: caleb and camille fang
    I t was time for a vacation, so they all got fake IDs. The Fangs had just recently received a prestigious grant, more than three hundred thousand dollars, and they were going to celebrate, the counterfeit IDs spread out on the table. Mr. and Mrs. Fang were Ronnie Payne and Grace Truman. The children were allowed to choose their own names. Annie was Clara Bow, and Buster was Nick Fury. In exchange for this staging of real life, their parents had promised Annie and Buster that there would be no art during the four days they would be at the beach, nothing but a normal family getting sunburned and buying trinkets made out of seashells and eating food that was either deep fried or dipped in chocolate or both.
    Inside the airport, Mr. and Mrs. Fang read magazines about people who were supposedly famous but whom they had never heard of, forcing down banal information about miracle diets and movies they would never see—all in the interests of establishing their characters. Ronnie owned a string of Pizza Huts and had been married and divorced three times. Grace was a nurse who had met Ronnie in rehab and they had been living together for the past nine months. Were they in love? Probably. “Are you going to tell me what you’re going to say?” Mr. Fang asked his wife. “It’s a surprise,” Mrs. Fang said. “I think I know what you’ll say,” he said, and his wife smiled. “I bet you think you do,” she answered.
    Annie sat alone in an empty aisle of chairs and sketched various people in the airport. She held a fistful of colored pencils like a bouquet of flowers and softly scratched an image into the sheet of paper in the notebook on her lap. Ten yards away, a man with a huge, hooked nose and a pair of oversize sunglasses slouched in his chair and took surreptitious pulls from a silver flask in his jacket pocket. Annie smiled as she emphasized