Antsy Does Time

Then Gu

“Borrowed time, Antsy,” he said. “I’m living on borrowed time.”

It a

“Will you just shut up!” I told him.

He looked at me, hurt. “I thought you of all people would understand.”

“Whaddaya mean ‛me of all people’? Do you know something I don’t?”

We both looked away. He said, “When that guy . . . the other day . . . you know . . . when he fell from Roadkyll Raccoon ... everyone else was staring like it was some show, but you and I... we had respect enough to look away. So I thought you’d have respect for me, too.” He glanced at the unfinished gravestone before him. “And respect for this.”

I hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, but it was hard to respect a homemade gravestone. “I don’t know, Gu

He looked at me coldly, and said, insulted, “Hamlet was from Denmark, not Sweden.”

I shrugged. “What’s the difference?”

And to that he said, “Get out of my house.”

But since we were in his backyard, and not in his house, I stayed put. He made no move to physically remove me from his presence, so I figured he was bluffing. I looked at that stupid rock that said GUNN in crooked letters. He had already returned to carving. I could hear that his breathing sounded a little bit strained, and wondered whether that was normal, or if the illness was already making it difficult for him to breathe. I had looked up the disease online—Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia had symptoms that could go mostly u

Then, on a whim, I reached into my backpack, pulled out a notebook and pen, and began writing something.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.”

When I was done, I tore the page out of the notebook, held it up, and read it aloud. “’I hereby give one month of my life to Gu

Gu

I expected him to launch into some Shakespearean speech about the woes of mortality, but instead he showed me the paper, pointing to my signature, and said, “It’s not signed by a witness. A legal document must be signed by a witness.”

I waited for him to start laughing, but he didn’t.

“A witness?”

“Yes. It should also be typed, and then signed in blue ink. My father’s a lawyer, so I know about these things.”

I still couldn’t tell whether or not he was kidding. Usually I can read people—but Gu

Since his expression stayed serious, I thought of something to say that sounded seriously legal. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

He gri

Five places were set for di

Sitting at the Ümlauts’ di

Mr. Ümlaut didn’t make it in time for di

Dad came home early from work that night with a massive headache. Nine-thirty—that’s early by restaurant standards. He sat at the dining table with a laptop, crunching numbers, all of which were coming up red.

“You could change your preferences in the program,” I suggested. ‛You could make all those negative numbers from the restaurant come up green, or at least blue.”

He chuckled at that. “You think we could program my laptop to charm the bank so we don’t have to pay our mortgage?”

“You’d need a sexier laptop,” I told him.

“Story of my life,” he answered.

I thought about talking to him about Gu

Before I went to bed that night, I took a moment to think about the various weirdnesses that had gone on in Gu

I opened a blank document on my computer, and typed out a single sentence. Then I pulled up the thesaurus, changed a few key words, found a really official-looking font, put the whole thing in a hairline box, and printed it out:

I, Anthony Paul Bonano, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath one month of my natural life to Gu