I was starting down the aisle to my seat on Flight 288, moving past the woman with the white hair who was holding the overfed chihuahua, past the curvaceous athletic teenager who dropped her phone under the seat, when I locked eyes with an athletic tanned man sitting in 5C. He smiled, great smile, white perfect teeth, dark almost black eyes, graying hair. Why was he sitting there like that with bare shoulders?

Welcome, welcome, to the April 2022 issue of Defenestration! It might be spring, but the weather has gotten cold and wet and miserable around Defenestration HQ, which means we all had to dig our sweaters out of storage and made the tough decision to burn our charming wooden deck furniture for warmth. Nature is against us, friends, but that hasn’t stopped the latest issue from dropping right on time.

Transmogrify, take a ceiling beam if you wish, my words will retain their meaning whichever way you choose to hang. All I beseech you is, please, save your questions until the end. Dawn is but a few hours hence. And we must use what these new men call the “small hours” to master my last class in stakeholder management.

In retrospect, it might have been a bad idea. But Bo didn’t have the luxury of living retrospectively. He lived in the now. And what he’d done in the now, which is to say a month ago, was to buy his lover a coffee mug. On the otherwise white mug, in red letters decorated with tiny hearts, were the words Best. Mom. Ever. At first he wasn’t thrilled with the periods. Wouldn’t the message have been better without them? Best Mom Ever. Or even a full sentence: You are the best mom ever. But, as he thought about it, he began to like the periods. They made the message emphatic.

I escort my wife into the home of an old friend, one Percival Fisk, where we will stay for a few weeks or until our latest folly blows over. The Fisk household casts an idyll of domesticity that we enjoy. Framed pictures of the Fisks are scattered throughout, mostly of their children and erstwhile pets (eight dogs, one goldfish; the cat was never caught on film) along with watercolors of the seaside and novelty wooden placards: Welcome to the Fisk’s. We love our children equally, there is no need to ask. Please do not smoke in our bathrooms. A cable knit throw of a horse mounted cowboy dresses the couch. The living room keeps no television, nor tolerates any appliance more complex than the old tube radio.