blue eyes and a decorative nail through his earlobe winked. "Turn over. Iím gonna learn you the difference between rape and love. Just so you won't forget."

"Orville's Lesson in Love" was published two years ago. The story was simple, yet Alex enjoyed the crude justice that the pulps demanded. And these days, Alex was grateful to see his name in print on more than bills and junk mail.

Alex wondered if he still had a readership, as the editor claimed. For macabre vignettes, yes. For a novel? Did the readers of The Best Year His Life ever wonder why Alex never wrote another novel?

Alex walked down the hall to his study. He leaned against the doorframe, looked at his desk. On the desk was his computer. Next to the computer, a notebook with several ideas for a novel. The notebook was mostly scribbling and doodles.

The notebook beckoned. He flipped through it, pausing every few pages to review his notes. The notes were mostly character sketches, based on people he knew at the college. As he reviewed the sketches, Alex was angered for the thousandth time. He had written his first novel in three months, filling four yellow legal pads. He wrote standing up, fifteen hours a day, quitting at midnight to sleep on the floor. Alex had been afraid that if he quit writing, he would lose his train of thought: just as when he was a teenager, he read novels in one day, stopping only for lunch and for whatever psychosis medication was in vogue.

Now, staring at his desk, Alexís anger soared. The anger demanded satisfaction, but the satisfaction had to be gained carefully, without mistakes. He straightened out his notes, filed the letter from Blood, then went for a drive.

He took highway 40 south, past Pine Lake. After a half hour on the highway, Alex turned left onto an unnamed gravel road. He cruised at 45, enjoying the soothing hum of tires against black road.

As he tossed his fifth cigarette butt out the window, the headlights revealed the blue windbreaker and red cap of a hitchhiker. Alex slowed, as if to pick up the hitchhiker; as the hitchhiker smiled, Alex stomped the accelerator. The hitchhiker dropped to his haunches and raised his hands, as if praying.

Alex parked the car on the road's shoulder, and walked the twenty feet that separated the collision from the body. The hitchhiker was on his back, yet his face was flattened into the road. Alex could not see where the bony gruel of the hitchhiker's face ended and the gravel began.

After studying the body, Alex removed a notebook and pen from his jacket pocket. "This is probably a futile gesture, but the way you landedÖJesus!" In his notebook, Alex recorded the geometrical perfection and skeletal perversion with which the body rested.

Then he bled the hitchhiker. The blood was not bad: nothing memorable, nothing destructive. On the drive back home, Alex noted with some relief that his eyesight had not worsened, his hearing was fine, and he had developed no smokerís hack or diabeticís loopiness. The hitchhiker had been in ordinary health, and that was enough for tonight.