LIVING WELL

The human mathematical equation that would explain the chronic feeling of displacement from which gifted individuals frequently suffer, can be traced back to the improbability of their being born into the families that raised them, the local Milton Junior College text read, Sometimes, in order to provide hope for a genetic trainwreck, a "variable" is born.

Bogart Freely was certain he was the "variable" of his textbook, Genius Rising by John Paul Slumberger, since for many years he was plagued by the persistent feeling that he didn't belong in his life; in a journal entry dated 1/1/69, he made the resolution to do something about it.

Bogart grew up with no father; his mother, Ethel, was a loud opinionated woman who didn't trust Bogart to wash well so she bathed him herself until he was thirteen. He wasn't allowed to have friends over unless Ethel knew the parents; another criterion was that the families had to attend the same church as the Freelys - a small congregation called Living Well which met in a building that was once a 7-Eleven on Burchill Road in Fort Worth, Texas.

The few times Bogart dared to bring a friend over, Ethel embarrassed him with her chastity sermons delivered from their sun yellow kitchen while she made the ritual Sabbath meal of gooey chicken and dumplings. Once she even showed Bogart's only good friend, Gerald, the large rasberry hemangioma at the top of her fat milky thigh which she believed looked exactly like the face of Jesus as it appeared on the Shroud of Turin.

On his 20th birthday, Bogart went to the local Home Depot to purchase the items necessary to carry out his plan with Gerald as his assistant, who by now was well-versed in chemistry and biology. The two would administer the cyanide which would be readily available in the Milton labs since Gerald - often referred to as the "science golden boy" on campus - had successfully requested a series of toxicology experiments on rats. Once the body was transported in a van Gerald would borrow from his father (Bogart didn't have a car and Gerald drove a VW Beetle), then placed in an earthen pit dug the night before, the sodium hydroxide could be mixed with water.

It would be the perfect crime, Ethel's rasberry stigmata and the surrounding tissue digested to the consistency of her chicken and dumplings once she got a good bath; there would be little more than her brittle bones remaining in the deep quiet earth behind Living Well.

BIO: Teresa Cortez of Sugar Land, TX