Think

She felt at the holster on her belt, but the gun wasn't there.

Despite the danger this suggested, it was almost a relief. Her pesky daily anxieties could find no mental real estate when faced with impending murder.

The criminal across from her stood tall (wanted on four counts of homicide, needed for a line-up on some other case entirely) and flipped her knife around in the dreaded, deadly, downward position.

"What's the matter?" the woman said, referring to Think's searching fingers near her holster. "Didn't bring a tampon?"

Oh ha ha! What a card, this woman. But the truth was, Think didn't know how she'd misplaced her service weapon, or how she'd ended up here, alone, without back-up, with the odds stacked against her. The truth was Think was boned.

The criminal dug into her jeans' pocket with her free hand before unsheathing again, her hand still technically empty, and yet...

"Here," said the criminal. "One bad kitty to another." She pretended to throw something to Think, underhanded.

As soon as Think "caught" it, she immediately identified this invisible item: a tampon.

"Lifesaver!" cried Think. She 'unwrapped' it and channeled the mind of her 'closer' probationer, Pierce London, and all the hard-learned Stanislavski philosophies therein. Put another way, she acted. She mixed those lessons with the euphoria she'd sampled from probationers past. Stirred it with the urgency she remembered so well from Clay Thomas. Count time count time. Spiked it with a sudden physical reflex, hands held high again, a karate formation she couldn't name, to suggest she was not yet out of her criminal tete-a-tete. She made damn sure it was written on her mug, externalized, dramatic, obvious, and she knew she'd been successful, because the audience busted into laughter, and not the forced-guffaw kind, either.

Think was on stage, and she was killing it.

The Always Improv theatre usually penciled in the student troupe, And the Town was Saved, to a brief ten minutes to close the show. Tonight? They were riding high at a minute eighteen easy, with no hurry-it-up laser light in sight.

The cop-and-robber routine was scuttled at the proper moment, too: she and her improv classmate Delilah (the 'criminal') were cued away by another classmate who took over the stage and segued into a scene about a tampon restaurant. They were on fire. There was rumor of a flesh-and-blood celebrity in the back row: Emmett Highsmith, Hollywood bigwig, too many classics to count (including that series about fictitious Transference officers. What was it called? Hollywood Minds). Was he watching? Was he impressed? Did he still have a hate-on for Transference and Quorumets and surveillance for some limousine-liberal reason?

She mimicked his put-upon, trans-Atlantic, faux-Kennedy accent in her mind: "This government force is an outrageous, insidious, illegal, unconstitutional encroachment upon the rights of Americans and humans aforth!" Cue the image of tux-clad Emmett on his red-carpet soap-box a month earlier outside a movie premiere. The star had shaved his head for his 'Big Moment,' as a visual protest against Transference and government-mandated brain surgeries in general. He looked better with hair. The accent was stupid-fake yet frustratingly sexy: "We, as guardians of thought, must not normalize neurological impropriety!"

Here she was, under stage lights, a mile and a half away from where the red carpet once lay. The impropriety was afoot. The adrenaline real. The improv comedy hurtled in fast, fun, and messy, like the Christmas cards at the end of Miracle on 34th Street. (Think shelved the simile and made a point to later plant it in-scene.)

And as the next bit reached its zenith, Think sprinted downstage, hands wailing for the others to beat it, her

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