1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose

those for lumber and refrigerators are at the pharmacy windows, where fidgety, glassy-eyed neighbors greet one another with the casual inquiries one might expect at a restaurant: “What are you gonna have? The Valium here is good. But I’m going with the Paxil. Last week I had the Xanax and it didn’t agree with me.”
    We talk about prescription medications now as if they were the soft-shell crabs at Clancy’s. Suddenly, we’ve all developed a low-grade expertise in pharmacology.
    Everybody’s got it, this thing, this affliction, this affinity for forgetfulness, absentmindedness, confusion, laughing in inappropriate circumstances, crying when the wrong song comes on the radio, behaving in odd and contrary ways.
    A friend recounts a recent conversation into which Murphy’s Law was injected—the adage that if anything can go wrong, it will.
    In perhaps the most succinct characterization of contemporary life in New Orleans I’ve heard yet, one said to the other, “Murphy’s running this town now.”
    Ain’t that the truth?
    Here’s one for you: Some friends of mine were clearing out their belongings from their home in the Fontainebleau area and were going through the muddle of despair that attends the realization that you were insured out the wazoo for a hurricane but all you got was flood damage and now you’re going to get a check for $250,000 to rebuild your $500,000 house.
    As they pondered this dismal circumstance in the street, their roof collapsed. Just like that. It must have suffered some sort of structural or rain-related stress from the storm, and then, two weeks later, it manifested itself in total collapse.
    Now, I ask you: What would you do if you watched your home crumble to pieces before your eyes?
    What they did was, realizing that their home now qualified for a homeowner’s claim, they jumped up and down and high-fived each other and yelled, “The roof collapsed! The roof collapsed!”
    Our home is destroyed. Oh, happy day. I submit that there’s something not right there.
    I also submit that if you don’t have this affliction, if this whole thing hasn’t sent you into a vicious spin of acute cognitive dissonance, then you must be crazy and—as I said—we’re all whacked.
    How could you not be? Consider the sights, sounds, and smells you encounter on a daily basis as you drive around a town that has a permanent bathtub ring around it. I mean, could somebody please erase that brown line?
    Every day I drive past a building on Magazine Street where there’s plywood over the windows with a huge spray-painted message that says: I AM HERE. I HAVE A GUN .
    Okay, the storm was more than two months ago. You can take the sign down now. You can come out now.
    Or maybe the guy’s still inside there, in the dark with his canned food, water, and a gun, thinking that the whole thing is still going on, like those Japanese soldiers you used to hear about in the 1970s and ’80s who just randomly wandered out of hiding in the forests on desolate islands in the South Pacific, thinking that World War II was still going on.
    The visuals around here prey on you. Driving in from the east the other day, I saw a huge gray wild boar that had wandered onto the interstate and been shredded by traffic. Several people I know also saw this massive porcine carnage, all torn up and chunky on the side of the road.
    It looked like five dead dogs. Directly across the interstate from it was an upside-down alligator.
    I mean: What the hell? Since when did we have wild boars around here? And when did they decide to lumber out of the wilderness up to the interstate as if it were some sort of sacred dying ground for wildebeests?
    Just farther up the road a bit are car dealerships with rows and rows and rows of new cars that will never be sold, all browned out as if they had been soaking in coffee for a week, which I guess they were.
    All those