Your new gray flannel suit

It is green, moist and very late in the afternoon. A hot springtime in your far youth-- a day like that. You actually hear a cicada hissing nearby. You can actually hear that cicada and the kiss of your tires rippling against the hot, black asphalt, simultaneously. A genuine, very bright green magnolia coalesces next to a mailbox. Best to park here. The car shudders off and there is instantly, a smell of cut grass or horse feed permeating everything.

Coming up on the long, long treelined driveway you see the typical strewn hazard of entitled suburban childhood. Skip rope. Dollies. Chalk and questionable drawings and scribbled out messages. A sound like bells, and one of the little darlings is upon you, a clean white dress like an orange blossom, like frosting. A rolling cherry red tricycle. It's like something out of Norman Rockwell for fuck's sake. She stops abruptly and looks at you. You feel your blood sugar spike as you realize this assignment, your assignment, will really be a piece of cake. Like a piece of diner cake perspiring under glass. Your mouth waters a bit.

"Is your mother home little girl?" Try to sound not like Paul Lynde. You want Garrison Keillor.

"Ye-eesss."

But just as you breathe easily and feel gently the paperwork inside your raincoat there is a shimmer of white from either side and these two flickers of something and it's snapping the meat on your jaw, the hot, black asphalt, somehow you are against the ground, face down, your eyes can't hardly open from the pressure and the soft snap shock of hitting the ground, dear God!

Suddenly and as you feel someone taking your wallet, the asphalt hardens against your face and knees-- all you see is blurred, fractional. Mary janes, and farther off a dollie and your hat, distorted by distance against the hot, smooth street. Shaken, shaking and trying to break free now like a jumping bean. And what the fuck is going to happen now?

Surprised and outraged somehow they got the jump on you, you're hitched, you're down, it's been a full ten seconds or so and you can't beat them-- you don't know what the hell happened. Another moment passes and several small sticky hands have palpated your wallet and confiscated your paperwork.

It's been a long time since you've been in this position, and frankly your knees have had it. Just as you begin a long slow sigh and start to muscle against your bonds, you close your eyes and begin the sigh of someone about to address their captor, it's all over. You are unroped and kicked over gently so quickly you don't realize it. The shock is like that when you are about to fall asleep-- the moment in between sleep and waking when you inevitably dream that you are falling down stairs and when you jump and hit the bottom, you awaken and you are alone. There is no one. No little girl, no mary janes. Nothing but the hiss of a cicada and sidewalk chalk taking on moisture in the heat.

There is a gentle wave to the branches framing a break in the woods. Is that receding sound laughter or the cry of a hound? Did I just get robbed by invisible little girls?

But you don't have your wallet.
And you certainly didn't serve anyone with any very important paperwork.
But you certainly don't have it anymore.
And you have a very, very uncomfortable split on the right side of your face from the almost sickening-sweet thud of your head against the deep black driveway.

Everything is purpling up with the advancing dusk. Everything is very through the looking glass.

You shuffle back to the car where everything is just as you left it. You put the car in gear and motor away as fast as you can manage. After a minutes you pull out your mobile phone and dial a call. It was a terrific day to be a junior g-man.