“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice. I could scarcely breathe as his cold fingers wrapped about my cheek, his tiny knife pressed against my innocent throat. It seemed a foolish thing but I dared not laugh. On his leg a great iron told me that he was a prisoner, and that the value of my life would be less dear than his safety.

“M’boy,” he mumbled into my ear. “An’ wha’ ha’ y’got f’ ol’ Apostrophin’ Jack?”

“Oh, sir!” I begged. “I have only a Sony Vaio All-in-One Desktop PC w/ Intel 1.7GHz Dual Core and 19” LCD! Please, sir, my family can afford no iMac!”

Jack laughed a terrible laugh, a laugh that was full of blood and murder and yet, somehow, a bit too short. He took hold of my ear and looked me in the eye not a nose away from my throat.

“I’ ‘at th’ on’ ‘at go’a-”

“You mean the 1.73GHz Intel Pentium dual-core processor T2080 with 533MHz front side bus and 1MB L2 cache? Oh, yes, sir, it does indeed! And a 19” WSXGA+ display capable of 1680×1050 resolution with XBRITE-HiColor Technology besides!”

Jack looked at me curiously. “How’d y’do ‘at?”

“Do what, Jack?”

“Tha’ plussy thing y’did. How’d y’do tha’?”

Perhaps I should have run, then, while he was distracted. But I was gripped by fear. A fear that held my boots the way a fat man holds a Power Girl doll.

“I… I don’t know, Jack. But there’s a built-in camera and microphone as well, Jack. And a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 with 399mb of shared memory with ATSC and NTSC TV tuner support. And a remote and a wireless mouse and keyboard and… and… well, you could do it all, Jack!”

“An’ th’ burna’?” The oily convict crouched to breath in my face. I swallowed hard.

“A DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/DVD-RAM optical drive.” Jack grabbed my lapels and threw me to the hard cold ground.

“Y’did it again, lad! That plussy thing! How’d y’do that, damn y’eyes? Tell me how y’do that!”

Jack was beside himself with rage, forgetting to apostrophe his words. In the distance, I heard the faint bark of dogs. Jack did too. He looked me in the eyes and put a finger to his lips and melted into the foggy night. I lay there for some time, my trousers covered in mud, my heart racing. Finally I took up my Sony Vaio All-in-One Desktop PC w/ Intel 1.7GHz Dual Core and 19” LCD and continued on my way.

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