The Grone Protocol: The Alabaster Mask of Iniquity, Chapter 008

Like most of you, I am a popular writer of highbrow thrillers and suspense novels in my spare time. For your entertainment and erudition (both of which I care about so much it gives me night terrors), I will be serializing my latest work, THE GRONE PROTOCOL, here in my “blog” (short for “web blog”) every "week" (seems more like bi-monthly now, but whatever). Here’s the eighth chapter, which should more than fill your daily quota of gripping intrigue. If not, just google "gripping intrigue" and leave me alone.

008

Chi Chi Caraniveggilio stepped out onto the balcony like a butterfly fart. As the party carried on inside the living room, she sighed and lit a tampon from her purse, believing it to be a cigar. After putting out the tampon and realizing she had left her cigars on the coffee table, she sighed again, twice. "Mama Mia," she thought. "I've really burned the spaghetti this time."

Chi Chi was an Italian, from Italy, and she liked to smoke cigars. She had been a world-famous local celebrity in her hometown of Genoa, the host of the gourmet cooking show "La Camera Squisita Grande di Come Circa Lascili Mangiano un Certo Molto Buon Alimento Oggi che Caratterizza il Vostro Chi Chi Ospite" ("The Big Delicious House of How About Let's Eat Some Very Good Food Today Featuring Your Host Chi Chi"), a program whose revolutionary approach to microwaving and ludicrously cumbersome title made her an international superstar in Genoa and its surrounding villages. Chi Chi relished her fame, but she gave it all up to come to America, where she lived a life of quiet, cigar-filled anonymity.

Chi Chi loved her life in the States, and loved regaling her new American friends and acquaintances with tales of microwaving damn near everything she felt like. But Chi Chi had a secret. A secret that she was totally never ever going to tell anybody in a million billion years, even her Mom or her very best friend in the world or postsecret.com. A secret that, if revealed, would no longer be a secret.

As she walked back into her neighbor's nephew's bar mitzvah to retrieve her cigar bag, she paused. A thought crept into her head: "Provengo da un paese differente che sono dentro ora ed ancora penso occasionalmente in lingua della mia nazione precedente," which means something in Italian. If she was from the future instead of Italy, she would know that no matter how untranslated her thoughts were, they weren't untranslated enough to prevent what was about to happen.