by Cyn Bagley

Created on: August 11, 2007   Last Updated: May 05, 2010

His tuxedo T-shirt is tucked into a pair of wrinkled Dockers pants. He wears two socks, one black and one navy, which peek from under his pants. His hair, a mixture of gray and brown, spikes around a face with a two-day shadow and hung-over eyes. Glasses complete the ensemble. They hang around his neck and swing to moans as he reaches for a cup of coffee and a red pen.

Who is this madman?

You are in the presence of an Editor in "Her Majesty's Service."

Goal?

To stamp out lawlessness . . . and . . . or . . . e-vil. Yes, to obliterate misspelled words, wrong verb tenses, consumeristic language-you know, the dreaded "you" format in business correspondence-and in short, train writers to read and adhere to Strunk and White instead of using Roget's Thesaurus. But his main goal is to memorize five words a day from the Oxford English Dictionary: affectionately called the OED by the literate crowd.

An editor of such caliber must live, breath, and die by commas, periods, apostrophes, semi-colons, and other sentence structure markings. Food, clothing, and shelter-a must for ordinary folk-could be provided with a minimum of space and convenience.

What London editor needed fresh air, windows or-?

"Mr. Editor," the nasal voice emanated from a phone on the desk piled higher and deeper with manuscripts of various thickness and stages of red ink. "Mr. Editor?"

"Yes, Betsy," he said.

"I can't stop her. Ouch." BANG. "She's . . ."

He looked up. There she was . . . one of those American federally-mandated safety blondes; she could run into a wall at 15 mph without any sustainable damage.

The saliva dried in his mouth. It hung open like a bass on a hook.

Her short skirt swished the desk as she walked past him and sat down on a folded chair just inches from him. He hadn't seen anything that short since Bejonce's skirt at the Grammys. That is if he watched the Grammys.

"Mr. Editor," she said. Her voice slid across his ears. He could hear tones reminiscent of an alto saxophone. "Mr. Editor?"

"Umm, yes."

"My name's Mist. Mist Apostrophe." She smoothed her skirt, then leaned towards him.

My, my. There was nothing missing in Miss Apostrophe. He slowly drank in her appearance from the top of her blonde hair to the bottom of her spiked heels. She had enough in the physical department to satisfy a bust, thigh, leg, or butt man.

"Miss," he said.

"Mist," she corrected.

"Mist," he said. "Are you sure you're in the right place? 007 is just down the hall and is looking for a new sidekick."

If

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