Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

Franz came back the next day, with his girlfriend. Beautiful woman, taller than itty-bitty Franz. And, no offense intended to funny looking little guys, but you had to wonder how she ended up with him, and the only possible explanation was: poor parenting and low self-esteem. Franz told us she was a dancer, but there was no place in the city for a dancer to make a living except the exotic dancers in the clubs Nikolai owned. And the woman looked like a stripper ...

She had this great blond hair like a lion’s mane flowing back, and too much make-up on a naturally pretty face. She was wearing a black tank top that showed off the goods and these great tight jeans. She was like a walking shot to the hormones. And little Franz, he kind of strutted beside her, wanted all of us to know she was his.

Torstein elbowed me in the ribs and said, “Put your tongue back in your mouth!” Which I did.

Franz said, “I don’t want Tawny shaking it for losers at the club no more. She’s gonna move in with me.”

“How do you feel about that, Tawny?” Torstein asked.

“OK,” she said.

“You like dancing?”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “It’s the only thing I’m good at.”

“Not the only thing,” Franz said, and he said it loaded, there was no mistaking what he meant, and she gave him a look that was pure broken-heart. These big baby blues about to fill up with tears. She couldn’t believe he’d said something coarse about her, three minutes into introducing her to his friends. I guessed he’d told her that she was going to stop stripping and be a lady, and now he’d cut her down in front of us.

It was embarrassing for everyone, and more so because, rough as some of the guys in our group were, Torstein had made us see the value in each other ... no one even made nasty jokes around Torstein. Somehow it seemed like that stuff just wouldn’t fly with him, like it would be extra obscene to say something like that in his earshot.

I guess Franz felt the weight of everyone’s horrified stares, because he said, “Nah, baby, I mean you can do a lot of things.”

She gave him a crooked half-smile then, afraid that she had misunderstood what he meant, after all.

Torstein offered her some sunflower seeds, which she happily accepted.

“You’re welcome here any time, Tawny. In fact, I was just hoping someone like you would come along. There’s a lot of small kids in the park across the way every afternoon, and I was hoping to find a lady who might be interested in doing story time with them. Did you ever hear of a book called Where the Wild Things Are?”

OK, the stripper/story lady? I wasn’t sure this was one of Torstein’s better ideas, but Tawny seemed amenable. She took the book and went off by herself to read through it a few times, and later that afternoon, we presented out first story time. She got a pretty good response — maybe five little kids sat through the entire story, but a lot of drunks and bums had crowded around to hear the story, too.

The little kids gave the Tawny hugs before they ran off to do whatever they’d been doing before we crossed the street and invaded their park. The drunks and bums would have given it a go, too, but the rest of us standing around waiting for her discouraged them.

Tawny looked up, all smiles.

“That was great, baby,” Franz said. “I told you, you can do a lot of stuff.”