Admittedly, our fine webzine isn't dedicated to interviews of interesting people, but we recently caught an opportunity we couldn't pass up. We got a hold of a sous chef working in a state penitentiary. And while he had only a few moments to chat with us -- the death row inmates he serves are literally dying to get out -- the conversation was fascinating. He's asked that we not reveal his identity.

Q: So you're a chef.

A: I'm a sous chef, actually. I'm the hands-on sort of guy whose job it is to ensure that the food we serve is well prepared and properly arranged. 

Q: And you work in the death row section of a prison?

A: Yes.

Q: Don't you find that odd?

A: Should I?

Q: I mean, why ever would death row inmates need a chef, much less executive kitchen staff?

A: Simple. You can't send somebody into the afterlife on an empty stomach. Everybody gets what they ask for, within reason.

Q: So nobody gets a dozen coldwater lobster tails as a last meal?

A: I said, "within reason". If they asked, they might get one lobster tail, perhaps with a petite filet mignon and asparagus spears.

Q: That's a ridiculously expensive meal for someone about to die. How can that be reasonable?

A: Cut the guy a break. It's his last meal before they kill him. Besides, nobody orders lobster as a last meal. It's mostly chicken, sometimes spaghetti. And ice cream. Lots of it.

Q: Why ice cream?

A: [Shrugs] Comfort food, I suppose.

Q: So, getting back around to a prior question, why do we serve death row inmates last meals?

A: It's a little-known state requirement that everyone on death row must be offered a last meal. If they aren't offered a last meal, their sentence gets commuted to life in prison.

Q: Are you serious?

A: Absolutely. Look it up, it's a state law.

Q: So you're telling me that if I murder twenty people...

A: ...And I don't offer you your last meal, the worst you get is life in prison. Just don't tell the warden I told you.

Home usually is where the heart is, but if you can't find one or the other, then you've got problems.

When I was eight, firecrackers fascinated me. I mean the type you light up and throw on the ground before they go off in a rapid-fire chain of bursts that makes everybody in the neighborhood think they're getting shelled. But I wouldn't have been so intrigued if I had known then how quickly my life could go up in smoke.

I was twenty-six years old and life couldn't be better. Fresh out of grad school, I landed a job with a manufacturing firm. I'd just gotten married. We had a baby -- Cody -- on the way. It was high-time I moved out of my apartment and did what all the other respectable grown-ups did. It was time to buy a house.

The real estate agent showed us a three-two bungalow on the fringes of the county. It was a brand-new neighborhood. Some of the houses on our street were in various stages of construction at the time. My wife fell in love with it at first sight, and while it wiped out our life savings, we snapped it up at a bargain price. We qualified for special mortgage financing through a local bank. The deal was too good to pass up.

Then the savings and loan fiasco hit. Practically every local builder in the state went belly up, and many of the houses on our block remained unfinished.

The bank that had financed us hit hard times. They got swallowed up by bigger banks, and then even those banks were swallowed up. Every day we'd get mail informing us to redirect our mortgage payments to the successor banks. When all the dust kicked up during the financial mess had finally settled, our loan had come to rest in the hands of a national bank headquartered in New York City, thousands of miles away.

The first piece of correspondence the bank sent us was a "welcome" letter, introducing themselves to us. It was nothing short of a punchlist setting out the documents they needed from us to sort out the financial mess they'd inherited. Their letter closed -- politely enough -- with a reminder that we would occasion an immediate default and foreclosure if we failed to cooperate. By then we were eight years invested in the home, so we weren't in a position to take their request lightly. We mailed back a thick envelope chock full of everything they asked for.

Weeks passed. Then got this letter from a finance company we'd never heard of. As it turns out, the bank that owned our mortgage note also bought up the insurance company that wrote the policy on our home, and changed its name soon after. The letter explained that the insurance company was cancelling our policy due to "irregularities" pertaining to the title to our home, and that the bank would be following up with another letter soon. 

The bank never wrote back. Instead, it got its high-powered New York attorneys to do that for them. The lawyers said we'd defrauded the predecessor bank by getting a mortgage on a tract of land that -- get this -- did not exist.

We didn't have any money to hire an attorney, so I did the best I could on my own. I took a few days off from work to investigate exactly what had gone wrong. County records revealed that our neighborhood sat in an unincorporated sector of the county. The post office where our mail was processed was located in a city twenty miles south, but since our neighborhood was lumped into the same mail route, it was assigned the same geographic code as the city, despite being nowhere near each other.

That was just the tip of the iceberg my research uncovered, although, in retrospect, I did get carried away. Those couple of days I took off work turned into weeks. My dismissal letter had been sitting on the dinner table in a jumble of other mail before I even knew I'd been fired.

With no money to pay the note, it was a sure thing that the bank would take us to court. Nonetheless, I was ready. I'm no lawyer, but I did one heck of a job. You should have seen the look on the judge's face. He laughed those bigshot lawyers out of court when he heard them trying to foreclose on a property they said didn't exist. But, as if to add insult to injury, the bank rigged things so that nobody -- not me, not the bank, not the county recorder's office, nobody -- can say for sure who really owns the land now, and it'll be a long time before anyone can sort it out.

My victory, if you can call it that, was bittersweet. Luanne left the house one day while I was out at the labor exchange. She'd taken Cody with her. We don't talk much. Things are awkward. Still, she is good enough to let me spend time with Cody every other weekend.

The neighborhood hasn't changed. My neighbors -- if you can call them that -- are still bombed-out shells of never-built houses. I still draw water from a hand pump well in the backyard. The roof is falling in, and since I can't show proof I legally own the place, I can't refinance to pay for repairs.

But for what it's worth, the house is mine. I live here, I fought for it, and no one's taking it from me. Even when a man's got nothing left, he's got to keep his principles.

Remember Donovan, that two-faced industrial magnate from "Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade"? At the end of the film, he's in a chamber filled with chalices, each of which purports to be the true holy grail. Drinking from the true chalice brings life, but a sip from the false grail takes it away horrifically, as he comes to learn much too late.

If Twitter were around during his day, this is what we think his last status update would look like. And as an aside, notice how his final line of spoken dialogue: "What is happening to me?" so closely resembles what Twitter always seems to want to know (i.e., "What's happening?"). Coincidence? Maybe.

Indiana Jones & etc., and Twitter & etc., are property of their respective owners.

I've thought on it some, and I've found that I spend a lot of time in sandwich shops. (See: Fifty Dollar Cheese Sandwich Standoff). No matter how well stocked your local deli is, they can offer only so many combinations of bread, meat, cheese, and condiments before it gets boring. It's moments like these when you need to get subversive.

The deli I frequent makes the best egg salad sandwiches -- thick-sliced bread toasted until it achieves  the load-bearing strength for a half-pound of golden egg salad goodness inside. Add in a slice of yellow cheese and a dash of paprika, and you've got the best sandwich this side of New York State. Great as the sandwich is, man cannot live on egg salad alone, which is also why they offer foot-long hoagies. Having frequented this deli so often, it was only a matter of time before I ordered a foot-long egg salad sandwich.

The deli man's cocked eyebrow said it all: "Are you sure?" Without waiting for an answer, he got to work, piling into the hoagie bread three times as much egg salad as a normal sandwich -- and presumably a normal human -- should require. The sandwich was glorious, but I'm fairly certain that pain in my chest after eating it was not regret.

At lunch the next day the deli man shook his head as I stepped inside. He reached under the counter for the egg salad and started to made another foot-long, but I stopped him. Rarely have I seen more relief on another man's face. His expression was short-lived, however. It cut short abruptly when I told him I wanted a foot-long peanut butter and jelly.

With America being the land of the free where the customer is always right, it was a foregone conclusion that I would get my sandwich. Freedom to do such dumb things as this was practically written into our constitution.

Compressed into that one sandwich experience were all the summer vacation days of every year of grade school --  endless summers of days in the park, and always with peanut butter and jelly as a packed lunch. I might have lost a few summers -- you know, taken off the tail end -- by eating the whole thing in one sitting, but it was completely worth it if only to revel in the horribly perplexed look of the deli man.

I sprang out of bed in a panic. It took all of what little presence of mind I had left to keep from screaming. And even as I caught my breath, the last words I heard before waking up echoed in my ears.

"That light socket is wired into God. If I stick my finger in that socket, I'll go straight to heaven."

I lay back down. I wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight, I was sure of it.

The bare socket hung in the ceiling, fixing me with its disapproving one-eyed stare. Clara has been hounding me to put a light bulb in that socket. I guess I should have done as she asked.

"What, you don't have the guts?" the socket goaded in a tone that was equal parts drill sergeant and schoolyard bully. "Do it, pansy!"

"Do it," it said again, this time in a motherly voice.

"Don't ya wanna go to heaven?" said the bully.

"Things will be better," said the matron.

"C'mon, slugger," said another voice in a Boston accent that was too slick to be trusted.

Noise, static filled my ears. In it was a multitude of voices -- the chatter of crowded subway platforms and shopping malls, the whispered murmurs in library carrels. All of them came together like cellphone crosstalk, signals crossed in transmission. None made any sense yet all said the same thing. I knew what they wanted.

They wanted me to electrocute myself.

He had spent all day with her in the makeup store. And you could tell because she had so many swatches of lipstick on her hand that she looked like she'd developed some bizarre yet fabulous form of leprosy.

Howard smoked his cigarette to a nub, then flicked it to the ground and started on another. He smoked a lot, even for a Brit, especially when he was nervous. Today, Howard was nervous. It was rent day. Ms. Jin-Hee the Korean landlady took no prisoners.

"Oi, bloody hell. You really blew it this time," he said in his Cockney accent, as though he were the son of the last chimney sweep in London. With what worry and cigarettes had done to him, he looked like he belonged in the prior century. The tip of his cigarette trembled on his lips. "She's gonna send us to hell for this, she is, bloody hell."

Ben rubbed his eyes. "Shut up about hell. Hell is a place where you're a midget stuck in an elevator packed with fat guys after lunch, and egg salad sandwiches were on the menu."

"You're so bloody funny," said Howard, starting a slow clap. "You want we should make that what goes on your tombstone?"

"You got any ideas?" Ben roared. "Because your self-pity isn't helping." He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. "She's going to be here within the hour. We've got an hour to make the rent money -- that's plenty of time."

Eyes narrowed, Howard squeezed his lips around his cigarette and took a long drag. "Wishful thinking, mate."

Ben's eyes grew wide. He straightened up, and after a beat did a fist pump.

"What is it?" Howard asked.

"We'll write her a check," said Ben on a rush of inspiration.

"We don't have the money," said Howard flatly.

"What, you've never kited a check?"

"She'll know." Howard snuffed his cigarette and dug the pack out of his shirt pocket. "Damn," he said, peering into the empty box. He crumpled it in his fist and tossed it aside.

"She won't know," Ben said. "At least not for a few days. And that'll give us plenty of time to..."

A hard scratching sound snagged his attention. At his feet was a folded-over sheet of paper torn out of a yellow legal pad.

Howard's eyes fell onto the sheet like a piano from a rampart.

Ben jabbed an index finger at the paper and hunched his shoulders.

"It's her," Howard mouthed silently.

"She's here!" whispered Ben, then clasped his hands over his mouth for having said that out loud. 

Howard's eyes bobbed over to Ben and back to the paper, as though to say that he should read it. Ben stooped and picked it up.

"What's it say?" Howard mouthed.

Ben sidled up to Howard and straightened the note.

PASS THE RENT UNDER THE DOOR.

The two glanced at each other.

"Do you think she heard that part about kiting a check?" Ben whispered.

No sooner had he finished speaking than another note scraped in beneath the door. Ben snapped it up.

NO CHECKS. CASH.

"Oi, bloody bugger!" Howard said, and hid his face in his palms.

"Damn it, Howie!" Ben rasped so Jin-Hee wouldn't hear through the door. "What do we do now?" He shook him by the shoulders. "Focus!"

Another note. Ben slinked away from Howard and picked it up.

I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE.

"Maybe," said Howard, "if we just spoke to her, like normal human beings, she might cut us some slack?"

Ben wound up as if to backhand Howard. "What are you, crazy? We're lucky if she doesn't cut something out of us! This is Jin-Hee, man. Jin-Hee!"

A note slipped in with the text facing up.

I HEAR MY NAME.

Howard ran his fingers into his scalp and clenched his hands. "We're cooked, mate." He brought his knees up and curled into a tight ball.

A fifth note came in.

I'M WAITING...

Ben pressed his lips into a tight line. His eyes set hard into his face. "Maybe you are," he said, wagging his finger at Howard. "But I'm not." He went for the door.

"No, don't!" said Howard, but too late.

The door swung open onto an empty hallway. Stunned, Ben poked his head into the hall to look one way, then the other.

"She's gone," said Ben.

"Like 'up the hall' gone?" Howard asked.

"No, I mean, as in the 'vanished' type of gone."

Howard stood. "That's not possible. What do you mean..."

"I mean she's gone!" Ben got Howard by the arm and hauled him into the corridor. "There. Do you see her anywhere? No."

"But," Howard stammered, "that's not possible." He glanced both ways up the hall, then again to be sure.

"Well, it just happened," said Ben.

The two walked back to their apartment and shut the door. They hadn't gone two paces before the flutter of paper at the hall door caught their attention.

PMS
 
"How the hell?" Howard asked.

Ben unfolded the rest of the note.

PMS -- PAY ME, SUCKER!

All painted up, she looks like a Patrick Nagel portrait gone bad.

Meet Mabel. She's the last person you'd want to meet.

Her style is definitely locked in the early eighties, what with her hair up in a Pompadour poof. Below her padded shoulder jacket, Mabel's pencil skirt stretches at its seams like an overstuffed sack of potatoes. She isn't pretty, though no one would dare tell her that to her face.

Mabel's temper is on a hair-trigger. Differences of opinion often go her way after starting an impromptu shouting match. When that fails her (and it rarely does) she relies on the sort of persuasion that comes from shoving her pocket .357 into people's faces.

For Mabel, fear is an effective employee relations tool.

We're at it again - Transit Dreams, our collection of short stories and vignettes, is out now! Best of all, it's available for free.
 
Ah, so what's it about you ask? Transit Dreams is a curious collection of short stories and vignettes loosely themed around going places, getting around, and going nowhere. The most bizarre thing about these short stories is that some are true.

This anthology is now available for FREE on Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.