“Dad! Huey found something in the backyard. Come take a look! DAD!”

He got up, glancing at the bed groove where Kathryn should have been sleeping, too. “Groceries, right,” he mumbled, half-open lips and half-open eyes working in unison to bring him back to reality. He descended the stairs, took a hard turn into the kitchen where the smell of blueberry pancakes was still in the air and exited into the cold November morning to look at a freshly dug hole. 

... a bomb.

They called themselves New Amazonian Movement, NAM for short, even though no one used the acronym not even for propaganda, a radical group that supported Female Supremacy as the only way of life and was willing to do whatever it took to show it. No one took them seriously until they detonated the first artificial pheromones explosives in the U.S. capital. Fifteen thousand men were enslaved that day as an equal number of women awakened to dreams of dominance they never had before. The group’s ambitions were thwarted two days after the blast, but not before a dozen more devices exploded in other major cities. How an unaccounted bomb had found its way to Kennebunkport, Maine was a mystery, and not one he wasn’t eager to solve.

“Dad, what is it?” Jack asked.

“But Dad...”

Could but it wasn’t, it seemed. The gas canisters underneath were intact though they appeared empty. Nonetheless, it was only common sense to call the proper authorities to dispose of the explosive and, most importantly, Mary shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it lest a simple sexual fantasy became a living reality no one could handle. He covered the hole with a tarp and went back inside the house to make the necessary arrangements.

“Hello, stranger.” She teased. “Will you look at the size of these carrots? They’re even bigger than your...”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like that look on your face.”

“Okay,” she laid down the bags on the kitchen counter and left him mumbling to himself until the call finally went through.

“Good morning. This may sound hard to believe but I’ve just discovered an old bomb on my backyard...”

There was no response except the jolly sounds of his only son chasing the dog upstairs. “Kathryn? Where are you?”

“Geez! Please don’t do that.”

“You’ve seen it already?” He gasped.

“Hmmm... you didn’t touch it, did you?”

“Yes, it...”