When I start to have a desire to gnaw my legs off, freeing the rest of my body from 9-5 enslavement, I know it’s lunch time!

Trouble is, what to eat, and where can I go so that my boss and his daily planner can’t find me? My escape route combines cunning (staircases) and romance (three busted up Twizzlers for my cubicle mate in return for his silence). Most days, I pass the Clown and Puppet Emporium (which combines my fears of both medieval Latin and marketplaces) and head for the local bookstore. There, I run my hands over new books, until I get too many papercuts or my Fro-Yo cone drips down my Old Navy button up shirt.

There, in the stillness of the Home & Garden section, yogurt cool on my collarbone, I think about the book that I will write that will make me famous, MIME COLLAPSE. Yes! An amazing thriller about a world made entirely of mimes, soon struck down by an otherworldly tragedy that causes the world of mimes as we know it to fall! Imagine it! Mimes falling everywhere, white gloves waving in fear, the roads soon tarred with white makeup–people left to tragically  identify bodies through beret science.

Often, I get so caught up in my invisible mime box of dreams that I’m late back to work. That’s why those Twizzlers always come in handy, and maybe some left over Froyo as dipping sauce.

I’m nothing if not mimeful.

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Alison Burke is a writer from the Washington D.C. area, and has been a past Defenestration contributor. She enjoys cake and male models. She wishes her life was more like a Baby Bash video — save she would be the douche wearing a sideways cap as bikini-clad men grooved comedically for her viewing pleasure.