After several weeks at Reader’s Digest, bored of t-crossing and lusting after those union jobs with their dots and their I’s, Januariad Post got into trouble.

Ain’t that the way of the world? Folks’ll say you can’t put a square peg in a round hole. That’s a lie and they know it. Shave it down at the sides and bang it hard enough, it’ll creak home, but it’ll swell and crack come summer.

And so Januariad Post found himself swelling and not with toomesents, which this writer can’t spell anyway and gives not one fuck. Trouble arrived when those bastard I dotters of the Union went on strike and Januariad Post, for whom work was a condition of parole, tried to cross the line.

Scab, they shouted and lobbed bottles of india ink.

I ain’t, he answered, ducking and dodging.

Prove it, they said and handed him a rock and a molotov cocktail made with styrofoam and laquer thinner. Inside that jelly were 35 used pen nibs, the workers statement.

While the rest ran from the inferno like rats, screaming that they hadn’t thought he’d really do it, Januariad Post strolled away with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets.

At a newsstand he bought pint-bottles of bourbon, holed up in his flop and turned down the volume on the world.

Back near the burning remains of the Reader’s Digest Plant, blown clear by the blast, was a piece of broken bottle that had held the home-made napalm. On it, curling like two parenthesis and an ampersand, was the print of Januariad Post’s right thumb. They never found the rock.