The name is Bread. But my friends call me Ginger.

That's right my friends. He's back.

Well, sort of.

First off, if you haven't read this yet do so now or the rest of my post, not to mention general allusions I routinely make, will make no sense.

Now that we're all caught up I can explain the note I received under my door today. It was written on the back side of a ripped and rather trampled sign. For a lawn care sevice. Aparently, says the back of the note, No Job is To Small!!! It goes on to list such jobs: Spring Clean Up, Yard Work, Trash Remo- which I can only guess ends in -val. I can't be sure though because the bottom three quarters of the page are gone.

The note proper is from, you guessed it, my dear friend, the one, the only, G.B. And it reads as follows:


Be aware while I can't do justice to the handwritten form I have endeavored to preserve line breaks and punctuation as much as possible

Hi my Name is [names removed to protect the clearly guilty]
I Am [Name of wife of landlord] & [Name of Devil Incarnate, aka my landlord]'s son
I used to Live here Down the Stairs.
ON first FLOOR I will Be Expecting mail.
if You WouLD Please call Me
At [A number, notably a philly area code] And Leave a message
that I have MAiL it Would Be gReatly APPR.
Or contact [Landlord] or [Wife of Satan]
tHAnX.

So, friends and lovers, it would seem the occupants of this household are in a bit of a moral pickle. Ginger Bread is not the brightest bulb in the box. He recognizes he himself cannot check our mailbox every day to get whatever it is he aparently can't send to wherever he's currently hiding out. And yet he doesn't seem to question our complete faith in him despite several attempts by law enforcement officials to seek him out at our residence. We have a freaking phone number people.

Do we ignore the note and the mail entirely, simply try and remove ourselves from the situation given that we will be moving relatively soon? Do we wait and see if any mail actually arrives and call said number? I've always wanted to ring a crack house. Or do we call the police and tell them that clearly he's dropped by recently and given us a key to his hide out, a direct line in fact... Seems the clear and obvious choice. But, is it worth the mental worry of wondering what will happen if the police, who have clearly done a bang up job of catching him so far, miss the mark and Ginger realizes we have clued them in. Maybe this is some kind of test. Maybe Ginger is watching me as we speak.

Maybe the whole "No Job is To Small!!!" is actually an encoded threat, a portent of what could happen to me if I don't tow the line. I see what the Bread is getting at: Spring "Clean Up." Yeah, like I don't know what that means. "Hey Adrienne, it's spring and I'm B-Diddy and if you don't watch your back it's gonna be your hacked up remains I'll be cleaning up!" Or Yard Work, "How's about I bury you in the midst of my dejected and weather beaten lawn ornaments!" I'm not even going to go into the implicit symbolism of the fact that Trash Removal was cut in half.

Well, I only need to play apartment Survivor for another couple months. I've hatched a complicated two pronged escape plan. Assuming I can realize his entry into the house before he sneaks up the stairs and successfully kills me, I have two choices. If I felt I had a little time I could open the window down the hall and shimmy out onto the roof over our laundry room. I'd have to wait out there until he left which granted would be a bit nerve wracking, but I still think if I thought I had the time this would be the best plan. I've toyed with the idea of buying a fire ladder and leaving it out on the roof but then I'd be stuck in the 10 foot concrete enclosed back yard and would have no way out of there. So I think we'll stay on the roof.

If I felt like he would finish maiming the corpses of my roomates (I'm just assuming their deaths in this scenario, at best their dying screams would create extra sound muffling for my escape) too fast for me to have time to climb out the window then I could always hide in one of the three closets within easy access. The one outside of my room proper would be ideal as it has a rusty ladder leading to the attic, but would take longer and creates a higher chance of being seen since I'd have to wade through my clothes to get to it. The other two are in my room and pose about equal pros and cons. The left one is roomier and holds more sharp objects, my tool box as well as some umbrellas with pointed ends, an old flute, and a few pairs of stilletto heels but has the drawback of essentially sequestering me there. The right one is next to the kitchen door, easier escape access if I had to run once found but contains fewer make-shift weapons. I suppose the old jewelry box is pretty heavy and could serve as a blunt battering type of defense.

I wish I could I say that I've never heard noises coming from downstairs and gotten up to go hide naked in my closet in a panic.

But I can't.