She had run as far and as fast as she could.

She was half naked and humiliated, her excited breath heaving in ragged gasps.

Her tinnitus was raging out of control suffusing the world in its sanity-threatening ring.

She was in deep shit, her back to a dumpster in a back alley cul-de-sac, a giant hairy beast of a man looming above her even as he took his last lumbering step, big calloused hands reaching out—one through the ruin of her Kashmir sweater—his eyes wide with madness, his mouth laconically repeating the words, every three seconds, which threatened to drive her insane, “You are so beautiful.”

She had nowhere else to flee.

First her coworkers had had betrayed her.

Then her wardrobe had betrayed her.

And to add injury to insult, her tits had betrayed her, at least the right one, and had damaged her own eye in her run for freedom, which had turned out to be a descent into a lonely hell, no less mad, with but this one hulking occupant.

Suddenly, the scene from Kill Bill, wherein that tall horse-faced flat-chested bitch murdered like a hundred ninjas with a sword, leaped up in the back of her mind and leant fire to her stroke. For the entire time Donna Herford’s admittedly cute but tumultuous plight had been scrolling through her addled brain, she had been swinging that raw piece of lumber at this big pumpkin-sized, shaggy-topped head with the 9 o’clock shadow on the chin. The flashing of her suddenly crazed life before her eyes stopped with the resounding “cooooorrack!” of the board swung in her hands crashing into the side of that big chanting face, followed by the insane scream of… Me, it’s me—I’m alive!

“Yes bitch!”

“Umma who!” she screamed at the staggering man, shaken by the Chris Davis like swing of the irate survivor who was beginning to think of herself fondly as ‘the Hispter Bitch from Hell.’

The big Bluto-like man staggered from foot to foot as the splinters of the shattered board made a devil’s halo about his meaty head…which was suddenly coming back into focus in a much less damaged condition than it should be, with a surly scowl now knitting the overarching and primitive set of brows.

“Fucking die!” she screamed as she took another huge swing at the big head with her trusty board—only to see the splintered end of the board that remained in her hand whistle before his face and slightly scratch his nose, a nose that now flared as if a brass bullring should be hanging from the nostrils, steam about to gush from their furious depths.

She felt her breasts flap against the left side of her chest and flank and pull her off balance so that her shoulder hit the dumpster and she went to one knee in a half crouch. She could not however take her eyes off of the looming beast man that now towered far above, peering down with wide angry eyes and flaring nostrils—but hesitating in his speech as some clunky gear box in that giant and seemingly pretty empty head switched gears and a new mantra emerged from his cavernous chest in the form of embittered words, “You are not beautiful anymore!”

With those words he grabbed the bouncy locks of her $200 do—I knew it was too good to be true that big hair was coming back in style—in one grease-stained junkyard claw of a hand, and raised her head. Her neck became taut and she suddenly felt like a chicken in that terrible meat-packing documentary she saw filmed by those meddling vegetarians who had ruined Peruvian chicken lunch for her forever.

She looked up into his eyes, wondering if a wink or a smile would get her out of this; like traffic tickets. But, as her eyes met the blazing pits of this madman, she shrank within and could not muster a smile or a wink as he droned on in his new mantra, “You are not beautiful anymore!”

The increased tension and her own yelling had cranked up her tinnitus to a strident ring, as if she had fallen asleep while the TV was doing that irritating emergency warning thing, and had woken up inside of the TV, a TV that never stopped issuing that ringing warning that the world was going to shit—and now it was.

His other hand raised up high and clenched into a mallet like cartoon version of a fist. He flexed the fist once, tugged her head a little more to her right, and seemingly like a woodcutter measuring a piece of firewood to be split for the fireplace, nodded to himself in a pleased manner, and repeated, “You are not beautiful anymore!”

The ringing in her ears was already at an insane pitch, and then with this last chant of Bluto’s new mantra, the noise of the world took on a raging machine like quality, echoing from the walls of Donna Herford’s own personal Hipster Bitch Hell.

With a titanic—well Barbie doll titanic—effort of her cute little neck, Donna ripped her head away to the right, greeting the searing pain in her scalp that announced the baddest hair day of her life with a terminal certainty, just in time to hear the bell-like toll of the dumpster like some great hell bell as the big fist slammed into it and the vibration of the cold hollow metal thing that had become the backdrop of her downward spiraling world reverberated through her very being. A part of her just wanted to give up and sink into the cold hard asphalt.

But the chainsaw sound was gone—probably just a strand of doomful imagination—and the mantra came again to remind her that the man looming above her was not about to stop, “You are not beautiful anymore!”

Donna clenched her fist and screamed her fury even as she raised up from her knees to punch this big mug in his brick jaw, “Of course I’m not beautiful anymore! You ripped half the hair out of my head asshole!”

With those defiant words her little fist smashed into the big stubbly jaw with such a crack that she heard the impact above the ringing in her ears, and felt it—her hand—shatter on contact.

Still too enraged to go back down on her knees she leaned her naked back once more against the cold cruel dumpster and moaned, “I’m fucked now.”

The man had been standing momentarily stunned, her punch—although not harming him—having interrupted his chant. He seemed to be searching in his dimwit brain for his lost mantra, and—this being just Donna’s star-crossed luck—latched onto her last unfortunate statement. Then, with his eyes now wide in the attitude of ecstasy and his arms reaching low, the thick hair on the back of his neck sticking straight out like he had been electrocuted, and his questing hands pushing forward to her hips, he fairly moaned, “You need me!”

The ringing in her ears reached a crescendo and she fell back against the cold dumpster as those huge hands grabbed her waist, and finally, for the first time since the world went mad, she cried.

Next week, I promise to conclude Case 4. I do not yet have a working title. However, the mechanics of Donna Herford’s immediate and unsavory plight have already been woven on Fate’s lonely loom.

She’s not done yet!