A blue plastic Jesus stood on the toilet tank lid in Charlene’s bathroom. His gaze was always serene. He jiggled every morning when Mickelodia scrubbed the toilet bowl, but he jiggled with dignity.

On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Mickelodia took pause from her labors to consider just what the blue plastic Jesus really meant to her. She realized she thought of him as a sort of holy Ty-D-Bol Man, a tiny seeker who had abandoned his traditional dinghy and neat little yachting cap on a quest for deeper understanding, for union with the Absolute. For the blue plastic Jesus, there could be no more squirting around in suburban sewage systems, hailing incredulous housewives and informing them of the manifold virtues of blue toilet water. Now he was on the Pathless Path, preaching the gospel of the Tidy God within.

Such thoughts were not uncommon to Mickelodia. She had cultivated a “Rich Inner Life” to compensate for being stuck in the same house with her stepmother in Los Angeles.

They lived in a bungalow ghetto just off of Melrose. All the houses were the same: pastel stucco boxes with bars on the windows and the semi-obligatory palm trees out in front. Their neighbors were Mexicans and Koreans and old white people. Mickelodia wasn’t happy there. It had never felt like home to her.

The home she remembered was in Pine Bluff. If it had been up to her, she never would’ve left. Unfortunately, her stepmother, Charlene, had barreled into her life ten years ago like a typhoon of bad karma, sweeping away everything and everyone she had ever loved. Mickelodia was only eight at that time, but even then she knew Charlene was somehow responsible for her mother’s suicide, and a year later, her father’s death. The move to Los Angeles was only another part of the woman’s evil schemes.

Charlene was just awful, a tyrant. Mickelodia wanted to run away and hide from her forever—but she didn’t know how she would survive. She had no friends; Charlene left her no time for them. The streets were full of predators: junkies, thieves, whores and bums. They left vomit on the sidewalks and used-up condoms in the driveways. Mickelodia wished they would all take the time to read Krishnamurti and get enlightened, but she knew that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

The people who were successful in Los Angeles were just as predatory in their way. They hid behind sunglasses and car phones, constantly calculating the algebra of other people’s needs. Just being in the same room with the sunglasses and car phone crowd made Mickelodia feel like a leprous midget. She felt like she was being excluded from some secret society whose members took endless meetings in hives of skyscraper steel, where a kind of alien lizard-language was spoken that she would never understand.

She needed to believe that somewhere people were different. Somewhere people were wonderful. So she dreamed of a place where car phones were outlawed and money didn’t matter much. She dreamed of Pine Bluff.

“Screw L.A.!” she said, with a particularly vigorous scrub of her toilet bowl brush.

In the Pine Bluff of Mickelodia’s dreams, no one was ever mean or egotistical. Everyone lived in a web of gentle hippie magic, connected by threads of love and serendipity. The mayor wore blue jeans. The Tao was required reading in high school. The streets were shaded by elms, oak trees, and Monterey pines taller than any buildings. When two grown men couldn’t link their hands around a tree’s trunk, Pine Bluff threw a party and gave the tree a tire swing. The tire swing count was a source of civic pride. Anyone could tell you the number.

A creek ran through the center of town. You could fish for trout from the back porch of Wilfred Logan’s General Store—but you had to use flies. Wilfred disapproved of bait.

Water wheels and solar panels provided most of Pine Bluff’s energy. Almost everyone practiced a trade—from blacksmithing to zither stringing—so that very few goods were ever brought in from the big cities. Bartering was a way of life; cash rarely changed hands. Mickelodia imagined she could get everything she needed, which was really very little, by growing a simple garden and bartering her natural skills as a babysitter, a reader of bedtime stories, a gatherer of wildflowers….

“Mickelodia, hurry up in there, you detergent-sniffing trollop!” her stepmother bellowed at her from the living room. She sounded like a toad with a megaphone. Mickelodia could picture Charlene in her leather wing chair, duct tape wrapped around her fat cheesy legs, a Twinkee stuffed in her fat flapping mouth, a Harlequin Romance in her fat greasy hand.

“The stove needs cleaning, too!” the Toad Lady screeched.

Mickelodia sighed and finished up her scrubbing. In Pine Bluff, she dreamed, the self-cleaning toilet had already been perfected. Vicious stepmothers were beset upon by opossums….

Upon entering the kitchen, Mickelodia briefly genuflected in front of the white plaster Madonna hanging above the stove. “Hail Mary, full of grease….” She sprayed a fine mist of household cleanser about her, like smoke from a censer, and commenced the ritual wiping of the kitchen counters.

“Don’t use up all my Handi-Wipes,” the Amphibious Bitch From Hell croaked from the next room.

Later, Charlene’s neurotic German shepherd, Tartuffe, surprised Mickelodia as she was vacuuming the Oriental rug in her stepmother’s bedroom. The big dog bounded into the room like a puppy, almost knocking her over in his frenzy to attack the vacuum cleaner. With a high-pitched bark, he pounced on the Hoover as she pushed it across the floor. Much growling ensued. Mickelodia decided to let Tartuffe devour his prey. She stood the vacuum cleaner upright and screwed in the hose attachment at the back, so she could go after the dust bunnies under Charlene’s bed.

Without so much as a warning bark, Tartuffe pounced again, just as she was switching the vacuum over to the hose attachment. The resulting farting noise told her, without even having to look, that Tartuffe’s tongue had been sucked up the extension tube.

“No, Tartuffe. Oh god!” Mickelodia and Tartuffe engaged in an absurd tug-of-war, she pulling gently on the hose, Tartuffe straining with all four paws, eyes wide with doggy horror, as his long pink tongue grew longer by the moment. Mickelodia had a giggling fit, then she yanked the vacuum cleaner cord out of the wall socket and the farting noise came to an end.

Tartuffe was free.

He paced the Oriental rug in quick circles, flicking his tongue in and out of his mouth as if he was reacquainting himself with it. He shuddered and shook his head.

When the next dog sniffed his butt, what a story it would tell!

A shallow groan alerted Mickelodia to her stepmother’s presence. Charlene was teetering in the doorway, leaning heavily on her cane. The duct tape around her legs was crinkled and peeling.

“You randy little witch,” she said, “how dare you abuse my puppy.”

“What do you mean, Charlene?” Mickelodia was still sitting flat on the floor, weak from the giggles.

“Sucking on my poor puppy’s tongue. You’ll give him nightmares!”

“It was his own fault!”

“I should report you to the SPCA.”

“Oh, right.”

“You don’t think they know how to deal with smart-mouthed little tarts like you? They have ways….”

A happy thought occurred to Mickelodia. She’d finally had enough of her stepmother’s perpetual bitching—and she didn’t have to take it anymore. She stood up and looked Charlene right in the eye as she said: “Today’s my eighteenth birthday. You may be my stepmother, but you don’t own me anymore.”

Mickelodia knocked the vacuum cleaner over with a toss of her hand and walked right past her astonished stepmother, heading for the front door.

“Where do you think you’re strutting off to, Missy?” cried Charlene.

Mickelodia was already out on the front porch. “I’m free. According to the laws of this great land, I don’t have to be a slave to gross old cows with duct tape on their knees anymore—” an afterthought—“unless I need the money.”

“You need the money!”

“Sorry, but I don’t.” Mickelodia was feeling at once giddy and totally in control. “I’m going to Pine Bluff.”

The front door slammed shut.

“Fine!” Charlene yelled after her. “Go on! Live with a tribe of filthy hippies! I hope the lice eat you alive!”

The ones you love always hurt you the most, Charlene thought bitterly.

She derived great comfort from the sanctimonious lies she told herself.