The Case of the Holiday Clichés

by Elizabeth Bent

pulled out her phone and called for an ambulance to take Gabrielle into custody, and then snapped a few photos of incriminating objects—the welcome mat, the embroidered sampler above the kitchenette which read Home Is Where The Heart Is, the gingerbread cookies cooling on a baking rack on the kitchenette table.

  Guy came back a few minutes later, followed quickly by the ambulance. Diamond and Guy followed the stretcher out the door, and as Guy’s foot stepped over the threshold the magical shop of clichés- happy fat sheep, displays of yarn skeins, headless felted giraffe and all—vanished, to be replaced by the darkened windows of a vacant nail salon.

  Diamond eyeballed the poster of what seemed to be the girl from the cover of Rio by Duran Duran—the same red-nailed, eighties-haired, ruby-lipped vixen that appeared, body parts tinted white and green, in the windows of nail salons across the planet.

  She sighed, and turned away.

  One must pick one’s battles, she decided, and followed Charming Guy down the street toward the dark agency van that contained her niece.

 

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