"Mother, when are our cousins expected to

"Mother, when are our cousins expected to arrive?"

The cousins will "arrive" on the winter equinox.

"You mean winter solstice.", Doctor Huffley sent a tired look at Jim. "Huh? Oh, yes, of course." A dazed man he was. "Are these cousins...", Huffley lowered his glasses. "hostile?"

Jim shrugged half-heartedly and replied, "Family can be your worst friends or your best enemies... like shortest day and the longest night of the year, they make their mark...."

"Sometimes with a switch." Elroy completed without a speck of good nature. He spat a thick brown glob of tobacco at a nearby copper pot, missing it entirely, and obviously not for

-tunate enough to be able to afford another glob of tobacco. Elroy grimaced as his nicotine cravings worsened, revealing his brown teeth in his reflection in the drug store window.

Elroy didn't know that advertising executives had paid a Professor Loompanics to study drug store interactions between patients & their shop windows. In the window, he looked bad.

Some customers saw Prof. Loompanics's findings and mocked Elroy. The wind of the fist, the sting of the blow, all a testament to his transgression against humankind. Ethics was on

the fall he he thought. With frustration in his eyes he shouted to the skies above, "NO." Ethics must never fail or we were wrong all along. We cant just

give up. “Why not?” rumbled a voice in the sky, “Ethics, shmethics,” it said. The voice pissed him off, but a lightning bolt struck him dead. “Turns out you WERE wrong all along."