Congratulations on Your Vacation!

It’s been many a year since you’ve taken off from work. Eight years, to be precise. Longer if we don’t count sick days as “time off,” and most people don’t. So it would be fair to say you’ve never really had a vacation.

You spend most of your time working as the editor of a prominent magazine which delivers photographs of attractive disabled people in their underwear. Its a niche business, but you do all you can to keep the photos tasteful and the office a professional, comfortable, tolerant environment.

After all, this is, and always has been, your passion. Your hectic working schedule and solitary lifestyle isn’t an indication that you’re fleeing personal problems. You just love your peculiar brand of erotica so much that you, a mentally healthy and intelligent thirty-something with an impressive bank account, haven’t had time for a relationship or a hobby or anything else, really, aside from your photographs of vulnerable and convalescent young men and women.

But a lot of your readers aren’t quite so mentally stable. Many of them have very little free time, despite being unemployed, because they spend all of it clipping images out of your magazine and making impressive, twisted mosiacs and collages out of them. If you followed the internet more closely you’d know that there are actually around thirty of these guys, and that most of them really love your work.

But one of them thinks he can do better. His name is Barnaby and he’s going to break into your home this weekend (like all crazy fucks he has a connection at the DMV and managed to track down your address for a bag of Funyuns and a handjob) and hold you at gunpoint until you acknowledge that he is the greatest appreciator of your very specific brand of almost-pornography in the world.

You’ll politely and reasonably tell him that you believe that appreciation is subjective and that, while you’re glad he enjoys your magazine that it isn’t healthy for him to believe that loving something is a contest. In response he’ll shoot you in the shoulder and then again in the thigh, thankfully missing the artery.

At this point the whole thing will have been going on for a few days. It’ll be all over the evening news, the daytime talk shows, and that small group of internet fans you’ve acquired who will spend most of their time talking about how they all totally saw this coming (seven of Barnaby’s last twenty three posts had “I AM GOING TO TAKE THAT FUCKER HOSTAGE” in the subject line) and the police will have surrounded your house with snipers and the like.

Once the shots are fired they’ll assume you’re dead (which wasn’t far off since Barnaby was planning to do an “angry dance” then shoot you in the face) and storm your home. An attractive young lady cop will lead the charge, a woman named Marge. When Marge kicks in the door Barnaby will panic and shoot her in the calf, splintering her tibia with a .380 round.

It’ll hurt a lot, as well you know, and she’ll scream, but before she drops on the weight of her now ruined leg she’ll put two rounds into Barnaby’s chest and head, dropping him to the ground and eliminating the threat.

You’ll thank her profusely in a horse voice and the two of you will stare at each other across the room, united in that moment by your shared pain. It won’t last long before the two of you are loaded by the waiting paramedics into an ambulance and whisked away to the hospital. However, during the ride the two of you will hold hands, at least twice.

After your operation you’ll be up and walking, but because of thee bone damage Marge will be confined to a wheelchair during recovery. You’ll visit her and finally you’ll know what love is.

Over the course of your recovery the two of you will foster a relationship based on mutual workaholism and a deeply repressed loneliness that love of your respective jobs had kept buried for so long. Eventually you’ll take photographs of her. They will never be published.

Aside from that... Well, we’d prefer it if you were surprised.

As for the serious injuries, they’ll keep you from working for around two weeks. Don’t worry, though. Your assistant editor is well trained and your readership is loyal. Just sit back, watch some movies with Marge and try to enjoy the first real bit of time off you’ve had in a decade and a half.

Congratulations on your vacation.