Christmas in July hits me like a ton of elephant dung. My editor’s hounding me, so I take to hanging out in this dive, where it’s Christmas music 24/7. I’m here an hour, tops, when the caroling cuts mid-Jingle Bell. Static. Something murmured. Silence.

                All is confusion, raised voices, questions…but my attention's absorbed in the novella I’m pounding out on my Mac. “Earl?” I ask the man behind the bar. “I’m writing about a bartender.”

                “Helena?”

                “Yeah, me. Anyway, this guy goes to make a drink for this pretty girl. It’s going to be on the house, because, hey, she’s hot. What’s a really girly-girl drink?” I down the rest of my rum and coke, belch, then take in the scene around me.

                All is not calm. All is not bright. There is one question on everyone’s lips: who is Helena Eleanor Anne Reed?

                I’m about to confess that it’s me, but pause.

        Earl the bartender looks to me, eyebrows raised in question. “Helena, the man on the radio just said your name. Your full name.”

                “Did I at least win tickets to the big game?”

                “The last time that radio said someone’s name followed by static, that person was about to…” He clams up.

                “About to what?” About to what, Earl?”

                People down the rest of their drinks, forget to pay their tabs, rush out the door. And I sit here, bewildered and clueless.

               “I’m sorry, Helena.”

                I eye him as he bends down, reaching under the counter for…? Another drink? My tab? No, when he straightens up, he’s holding a handgun.

    “Whoa, what the crap?”

                “I can’t let someone like you live. I’m sorry.”

                Sweat trickles down the nape of my neck as I stumble off my stool. “Earl? What are you doing? We’re friends. We’re friends.” I keep repeating this over and over again in a whisper, praying that this is all one bad scene from my novella, my unfinished novella that I was working on when I should’ve been getting back to my editor. Silly, the things you worry about before you die.

                “I’m sorry, Helena,” he says one last time, his finger tickling the trigger.

                I close my eyes. Nothing. Nothing happens.

                “The last woman? They read her name on the radio, and she went psycho. Started killing people left and right.”

                “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “But I’d never do that.”

                Earl ignores me. “The man before that, he walked in on the previous owners, bomb strapped to his chest. Boom.”

                “So sorry. I’d never—”

                “The twins. They poisoned everyone. You. What were you going to do?”

                I look down at my Mac. “I was just going to kill off a character.”

                Earl relaxes. “That explains everything.”

                “It does?”

                “You writers. You’re all killers.” He smiles. The radio flickers to life. “Earl Tobias James.” Laughing, Earl pulls the trigger.