Donna

When I was four years old, my father was a sales executive for the local steel foundry and, consequently, there seemed to be a neverending stream of lame and broken men and women with hairpieces flowing through our living room.
I would entertain the frequent, unsuspecting guests that visited our house with trite jokes and hors d’oeuvres made of Saltines topped with salt (not a big hit among the ones with explosively high blood pressure, which were many, as we lived at the time in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, the absolute heart of the Bologna Belt).
Along with my famous dry sodium-shingles and my tried and true vaudeville act, I would further engage my audience with a little broken English. By this I do not mean that I struggled with expressing myself using the common native language, as in that area I was at least at the level of most eight-year-olds, or possibly Strom Thurmond. I mean to say that I tried to pull off a British accent that I thought sounded most convincing, for some reason, if spit out at 300 m.p.h., if speech can be measured in such a way. It was a neat little trick and I always got at least the courtesy laugh. I mean, who above the age of eleven was not going to give a four-year-old boy who sounded like Julia Child on methamphetamines at least a good old courtesy laugh, if only out of little more than fear. “ByjoveIthinkshesgotit!” I would speedily blurt out, assuming the posture and expression of a desperately insecure circus monkey, barely restrained by an invisible leash. “Oh my... right. Ha-ha-ha!” the rivet salesman from Allentown would nervously reply, quickly turning to the avocado plant to his left, pretending it had initiated a conversation about the Canadian trade tariffs proposed by Gerry Ford.
For this trick of mine and others like it, as well as my inability to draw within the lines in my coloring books (which, of course, initially seemed to indicate certain artistic talents but was later proven to be the result of far too much sugar and poor eyesight), I was enrolled in kindergarten a year earlier than everyone else, ensuring that in time I would be attending my prom with a mascara-enhanced peachfuzz mustache, a cracking voice, and enough uncontrollable hormones that I would start savagely humping the buffet.
I suspect that my parents reasoning in making this decision was twofold, in that 1) This would get me out of the house and allow my father to continue to age gracefully, and 2) This would get me out of the house and put a halt to my mother’s previously unknown condition that was causing her to age five years in the span of one day, if it so happened that on that day I chose to play one of my fun games with the neighborhood kids, such as “pin the tail on the deaf meter reader” (still my favorite).
So, off to school I went. I was three-foot-one, and while at home I’d grown comfortable with the way I towered over my grandmother, my fellow students appeared to all be at least twelve meters tall. However, there was one boy who was a bit smaller than me, which was a godsend. His name was Vincent and he was nearly subatomic. He, like me, could run very fast, especially when chased by Donna, the emaciated Laotian girl in the filthy pink dress who seemed to have full-body, extremely infected poison ivy during the entire school year.
Each recess, Vincent and I would just be standing around the playground, arrogantly discussing which direction offered us the most space in which to test our blazing speed, and out of nowhere would come Donna, mouth agape in a drooling, tongue-wagging mess, eyes the size of poached turkey eggs. And that pink dress, which as the school year went by, was looking more and more like something out of a George Romero movie. Come to think of it, Donna looked like something out of a George Romero movie.
We never really worried about getting touched by her, as when she ran she exhibited all the coordination of a box of long unused sports equipment tumbling down a flight of stairs, her head like a helmet bouncing off the railings and steps, her warped hockey stick legs tangling with each other as they savagely knocked everything near them. The sound of rubbing tape and frayed laminate filled the playground, emanating from a pink cloud of Calamine dust and spit.
No, we knew she would never actually catch us, it was simply the specter of her, the shadow she cast, and the heavy stench of layer upon layer of lotion and pus that made even the ten-foot demilitarized zone we usually enjoyed seem like not nearly enough distance.
To be truly free of Donna, we would have to kill her. However, since medical professionals had not yet begun handing out heavy, mood-altering drugs en masse and at the drop of a hat to small children, we just couldn’t seem to muster the psychotic anguish requisite to inspire such a move, so we just ran like hell.