DAVE FROMM grew up in Lenox, Massachusetts, where the local high school's mascot is the Lenox Millionaire. October is his favorite month. Then March.

                                                       neo-malthusian


The papers called him Bobby the Termite, but he preferred to think of himself as a neo-Malthusian, and as John. "It's virulent," he wrote anonymously to the Valley Herald after the police, investigating a collapsed transom at the Greeny Comfort Housing Development, uncovered his decades-long clawhammer campaign, "it seethes with sprawl."

The police, some of whom lived in the Greeny Comfort, disagreed. "This miscreant, whoever he is, has apparently been removing individual nails from GCHD structures as far back as 1993," they said.

John's moonlight sabotage quickly became a cause celebre among townsfolk old enough to remember the clover and holly and goldenrod that once blanketed Kelly's Acres like worsted wool, long ago, before the GCHD development began. Protesters took to the streets, arguing over consumerism and zoning and the environmental. Eventually, a town meeting was called.

John attended, standing quietly and unnoticed at the back of the hall. The crowd pressed around him hot and blurry, and as it did John dreamed of the Greeny Comfort's aluminum lamella and flashing and gussets. He knew the massive structure from footprint to wainscotting. In his dream, he imagined the next nail, and the next, until slowly, piece by piece, the thing began to evanesce.

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© 2003 David Fromm