George - to be continued.

George worked. He didn't have to. Although as a manager his contract called only for the occasional shuffling of papers and the vaguest of hand motions, George liked to work. This isn't to say that George was an exceptionally skilled worker, or even an average one at that, but the idea of hard labor appealed to his sensibility. He would spend hours rising and falling in a wavelike pattern over his samples of lace and swabs of nylon, imagining: festering blisters and sandpaper calluses, nails encrusted with barnacles of potato dirt, and patches of sweat with bits of dirty soot.

George worked in a nylon factory. While many would raise their eyebrows at this, let me assure you that George did not bat, under any circumstances, for the other team. In spite of a slight incident in the seventh grade, where he accidentally got excited while in the presence of a male teacher and consequently left school to pursue a life of work and responsibility, George regarded women as the fruit of life. And he certainly believed in the recommended four servings a day.

George's mother had always stressed manners and read to him every night from "The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility." Though George was, in fact, a boy, his mother believed that the readings would help not only his sense of propriety but also his understanding of women. She was of another time and would also never understand, despite being five times a widow, that no matter how hard a male tries, he will never comprehend the inconsistencies of the female mind. These nightly lessons stuck with George the rest of his short, long-lived life; whenever he felt compelled to indulge in letter writing, he could hear his mother's voice hidden in the recesses of his cochlea, hissing out morse code -- "the whole art of correct and elegant letter-writing."

When George turned sixteen he entered the nylon business. Not only was it lucrative, but it was also exciting. George had always had a penchant for women's hosiery and to be surrounded by it day after day provided more than enough fodder for his vespertine endeavors. It was something in their slick symmetry that got his proverbial motor going. Excelling in the little geometry (and the even littler Geometry) of curves and lines he knew, George had always liked math for its possible elegance and probable inevitability.

George's family had always been a little bit odd (the opposite of even). His four (quadratic) brothers fought in the street on a bi-weekly, crepuscular, basis (sinusoidal). Each fight generally ended in a bout of laughter followed by an exhausted sigh from each brother (the limit Hemmel --> end = resolved). One fight stemmed from the placing of Laurie's (the least element) big toe too close to Bernard's (the maximal extreme) prized Charles' Chips tin (the family's favorite snack). George was the middle child. They were commonly referred to around George's hometown in Abescon, New Jersey as "the clowns", "the no-good Hemmel kids," and George's personal favorite and tragically, the very rare: "those little fucks."

George liked to read very much and he found the most enjoyment in children's fables. His favorite animal was the bear, and Aesop always seemed to have enough bear-isms to appease his bearaciousness.

George also liked the color Orange very much. Orange had a kind of misleading mystique, a spoonful of snakesugar with the aftertaste of criminal appeal. Orange is the color of cellblock chalk murals and feels like tally marks on the cradlerobber's skin. Orange is what makes the sun want to fuck and the moon want to dance the lindyhop silly. And squeezed Orange, George's favorite, is equal parts cop, and robber, to pulp. George could loose himself in his daydreams of Orange: they allowed him a safehouse of monotone - an innocuous shade of eyeglass.

And thus, George was hit by a car.