Miss Mabel and I were in the middle of cooking dinner one evening when we heard a knock at the door.

We looked at each other and rolled our eyes. The last fifteen times there'd been a knock on the door—over a span of two days—it had been our downstairs neighbors wanting to use the phone.

Miss Mabel moved her head side to side, tossing her hair and squeezing her eyes shut. "No ma'am. NO MA'AM!" she said when I started walking toward the door at the top of the stairs.

"What?" I said.

"Those people are EVICTED! We're gonna EAT DINNER in PEACE and QUIET!" she screamed.

The knocking continued before I heard shouting from the front of our apartment. "You better open this damn door, or I'm gonna go get a wrecking crew to knock this fucking house down!"

That's when Miss Mabel grabbed a knife from the silverware drawer and pushed past me. "I hate to slit someone's throat just because they want to use the phone," she started. I heard her open the door at the foot of the stairs and say, "You don't wanna mess with a girl from the Mill Hill, that's all I'm sayin'!"

"Who the hell are YOU?" I heard a male voice say.

Miss Mabel screamed, running back up the stairs and slamming the door shut.

"What is it?" I asked, moving the hair out of her eyes.

"It's a man in a cowboy hat, holding a chainsaw! He's wearing a ski mask and a track suit," she gasped. "I think it's either President Bush, or one of those kooky Republicans who hates your column! I wish you'd stop writing about politics and start writing about gardening for that damned newspaper!"

She was almost in tears. But I just laughed and laughed, knowing it was not a Republican kook, but a John Kerry-supporting kook.

"Come on up, Precious Lamb," I called over Miss Mabel's shoulder. To her I said, "Honey, it's just Citizen Jim!"

"You mean that cranky old man who sits through every single Gilmer County Commission meeting with a tape recorder on his knee and pair of binoculars mashed up against his eyes?" she asked. She'd attended a few public meetings with me in my role of Krissy Sheets, Girl Reporter.

"No, honey, not THAT Citizen Jim! This is the OTHER Citizen Jim!" I said, rubbing her arms and trying to comfort her.

Just then, Jim burst through the door, snatching the ski mask off his face and pushing past Miss Mabel. "I'm gonna BUST YOUR MOUTH OPEN if you don't start some explaining RIGHT NOW!" he shouted at me.

After that, everything was a blur. I could make out a fuzzy form in the middle of the living room floor which seemed to incorporate pieces of my girlfriend, my best friend and my cat, Mister Meme. But I couldn't tell who was drawing the blood, who was bleeding, who was screaming or where all the hair was coming from until the blob became three distinct figures again.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

Miss Mabel was now wearing the ski mask and Jim's wrestling shoes. Citizen Jim—bleeding from a split lip, he sported the beginnings of a black eye, plus various scratches on his neck and arms—had on a white bra over his Pink Floyd t-shirt.

Mister Meme was bald except for a few patches of hair on the top of his head and the tip of his tail. He just hissed and hissed and hissed. But at least I knew where all the hair had come from.

"Now Stimpy, I think you need to tell this woman a little bit about how we interact," Jim said quietly. "Because I don't want to have to go through this every time I drop in for a visit."

Miss Mabel put her arms over her chest. "You can visit all you want, but HANDS OFF!" she said.

"Listen here! You're Stimpy's girlfriend, right?" Jim asked.

Miss Mabel nodded once, scowling.

"So you share and share alike, right?" he said.

Miss Mabel stomped her foot. "Wherever you're going with this, spit it out!"

"All right then," Jim said, then lowered his head and ran toward Miss Mabel. Grabbing her around the waist, he wrestled her to the floor. "Any best friend of Stimpy's better be a best friend of yours, too!"

"I'll KILL YOU!" Miss Mabel said.

But I knew this was the beginning of a wonderful relationship between the two people I love more than anything in this world, so I went to the kitchen and finished cooking dinner.

Mister Meme just kept hissing and hissing and hissing.

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