| IN GOOD HUMOR |
O
n the first day in May when temperatures reached what anyone’s mom would consider shorts and t-shirt weather, five middle school kids sat on an eight-by-eight-foot plywood platform under the rafters of the Severn family garage in Grain Belt, North Dakota, and compared notes on what they had discovered while stuck at home in the spring of COVID-19.
Rakish and rake-thin Curtis Severn had found, in that very garage, three boxes of Playboy magazines dating from the late 70’s to the mid 90’s. He studied them furiously and
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arranged them in order of excellence under his bed, where his mother discovered them. They weren’t there anymore. Byron Chaudry—dark haired, dark complected, and probably the only kid in town wearing a collared shirt that day—found a loaded handgun in his father’s nightstand and a Bible—King James version, Catholic edition, with a soft black cover and thin gilded pages— under his mother’s side of the bed. Scandalous, seeing how his parents were pacifist Muslims. He read the entire Bible like a spy perusing top-secret documents inside an enemy headquarters, sitting with his back against the bed
