I spent that morning cutting the grass. The air was heavy with its pungent fragrance and, as I sat that evening on the porch, I could see the curtains twitching all the way down the street as my new neighbors checked out the neatness of my lawn. Order had been temporarily restored. They no doubt slept well that night in the belief that I would maintain the perfection of our sleepy street. My labors that morning had confirmed my status as responsible, retired widower and potential case for redemption.

Having been forcibly exposed to the local women by means of the delegation who arrived, pound cakes in hand, the morning I moved in; I had little doubt that dozens of beady eyes were closely observing my behavior while their owners hastily calculated the possible balance of my bank account.

The interest hadn't surprised me. The estate agent who arranged my purchase made no secret that there was a shortage of eligible middle-aged males in this town.

I bluntly told her I was gay.

Why not? I didn't have to hide the fact anymore. That *was* the point of handing in my retirement request and moving here, after all. Still, saying the words out loud for the first time in my life was enough to make both my stomach and my cheeks burn.

I thought that would be the end of the matter. I was sadly mistaken. My confession halted her blonde, heavily-perfumed assault for all of twenty seconds. Then she decided I just needed to be taught the error of my ways.

I discovered that I didn't need a title and a suit to be surly. My bark had become such second nature that it even worked when I was wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt. I felt a little like a school-yard bully as she scurried off, tail between her legs but, two days later, when I went to her office to sign some paperwork, she hit on me again.

Can't blame a girl for trying, I suppose.

Before I'd even moved in, the word of my 'gayness' had spread like wildfire and rather than reducing my attraction as a potential conquest, it somehow made me an irresistible challenge. I suppose it didn't help that we were in the midst of a heat-wave. I spent most of my time in the yard wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts. While I've obviously never considered myself an attractive man, my one vanity is my physique and I desperately wanted to get a sun-tan before...well, anyway, that's why I did it. 

You have to work with what you've got.

I'm middle-aged, almost bald, virtually blind without my glasses, my ears are too big, my nose has neither the roman magnificence of Mulder's nor the button-like cuteness of Krycek's. My personality is gruff and surly. I'm not worth talking to in the morning before I've had three cups of coffee. 

But I do have a good body for my age.

My new neighbors certainly seemed to agree. Either that or it's pure co-incidence that every time I stepped outside of the house sans shirt, one of the ladies in the street had a domestic crisis that forced her to come and beg my assistance.

I told each and every one of them that I was gay.  The more times I said it, the easier it came out. Before long I didn't even blush anymore. To tell the truth, I got a sort of vicarious thrill out of the admission. After all my years of pretence there was freedom in being able to say such a scandalous thing to a virtual stranger and see the strange expression that flitted across their face.

Word spread and, if anything, it just made the situation worse. It seemed I'd moved into a street full of Scully-clones. Not one of those women were willing to believe until they'd witnessed the evidence with their own eyes.

Any time a scientist attempts to tell you that it's impossible for anything to move faster than the speed of light, the easiest way to shut them up is to mention the phenomenon of gossip.  When I was still at the bureau, my secretary Kim was living proof to me that Einstein was wrong. It didn't matter who, what, why or when; if it had happened she knew about it immediately. 

I used to spend hours locked inside meeting after meeting with Department Heads, attempting to get to the bottom of problems, sifting the disinformation from the outright lies. Painfully squeezing facts out of them was like trying to extract blood out of a stone. I was working for the Federal Bureau of Insincerity. The hassle went with my job. I accepted it. The only really frustrating thing about all those damn meetings was that a half-hour coffee break with Kim inevitably provided more useful information than any number of official chats.

My habit of spending a little time with my secretary every morning had a second benefit, of course. It was generally assumed that we were sleeping together. It suited us both. Kim is one of those people who is completely self-contained. She views the idea of sharing her life with another person with undisguised horror. I've never been to her apartment, but I imagine that it is as precisely neat and organized as her desk. She'd never risk anything as potentially messy as a man sprawling on her furniture. 

But she *loved* knowing everything about everyone else's life. Our little subterfuge allowed her to stay actively within her gossip-circle.  Her girlfriends were far happier to spread their tales of torrid affairs while they imagined that she was partaking of her own illicit relationship. I believe Kim has a virulent imagination, judging by the speculative looks I always received after she'd had lunch with the girls from the typing-pool.

Although sexual liaisons between the staff were officially frowned upon at the bureau, the idea of a boss sleeping with his secretary was accepted with the same 'don't ask, don't tell' as it was in any other walk of life. So, 'sleeping' with Kim was the red herring that successfully diverted all attention from my real sexual life after my divorce. 

Not that there was much of one for me to hide. 

One disastrously torrid and highly illicit love affair that ended abruptly when my so-called 'lover' pulled a vanishing act, one abortive attempt to mend fences with Sharon and finally a one-night stand with a female prostitute.

The prostitute woke up dead, my ex-wife was murdered and my lover transformed into a nasty, rat-bastard, double-crossing, treacherous, sadistic, murdering scumbag.

I never was lucky in love. 

~#~#~#~

A garden is a strange thing. When I last lived in a house I saw having a garden as being a burden, another unnecessary chore to fit inside the short hours of my weekends. When I was first married, I hated our garden. Its maintenance cut mercilessly into the time that I could spend with Sharon.

As our marriage progressed and I came home later and later from work each evening, the garden became a millstone around my neck. If I spent Sunday weeding and cutting grass, she'd accuse me of not wanting to spend any time with her. If I decided that spending time with her was more important than the gardening, she'd accuse me of having no interest in our house, of not caring anymore.

Then, towards the end of our time together, I *did* use the garden as an excuse to avoid her. She figured it out. We moved to an apartment. We spent more time together.

We got divorced.

I missed a lot of things when Sharon and I split up. I missed sharing my life. I missed being half of a couple. I missed having my dinner ready and my shirts ironed. I even missed our rows.

The only thing I never missed was the garden.

Yet the first thing I did, after it was all over and the smoke was still rising from the ashes of Mulder's battlefield, was contact an estate agent and begin my hunt for this detached property with porch, white-picket fences and a damned garden.

Maybe I just wanted the American dream retirement home. I didn't care that I was too young to retire. I *felt* old enough. I felt so damned old that my bones creaked at even the thought of moving out of bed some mornings.  It wasn't a physical aging, although the little hair I still owned was rapidly turning gun-metal gray. 

There were many casualties of our private war. Far more than were ever admitted to in the hasty cover-up that masqueraded as the public hearing. Many of the victims will remain forever unacknowledged.

One such victim was my withered soul.

I was battle-weary, scarred, battered and desperately in need of time to recuperate and find myself once more.

So I took the golden check, bought the house, waved my goodbyes, pretended to notice neither the looks of relief from my superiors nor the look of betrayal in Mulder's eyes, and I moved to Arizona.

Why Arizona?

Why the hell not?

Seemed to me it was the last place anyone would come looking for me and, the way I was feeling as I cleared out my desk, the further I could get away from Washington, the better.

It had *nothing* to do with the fact that Alex and I had once visited this sleepy little town back before his true nature was exposed. It was just co-incidence that I handed in my notice the day this particular house came on the market. The house whose picket fence I had leaned over, while strolling hand in hand with Alex, and commented that I'd one day like to retire in a house like this.

Co-incidence, and a hefty bribe to the previous occupant.

~#~#~#~#~

It was nice to sit out on the porch, sipping slowly at my iced-tea, with the smell of freshly mown grass heavy on the evening breeze. Other than the occasional barking of a distant dog, it was completely silent. All of my neighbors had drawn their curtains and called a temporary halt to their occupation of Walter-watching. The sun was slowly dipping beneath the horizon in an ochre sky that promised another glorious day on the morrow.

The thought of what that new morning would bring made the blood surge a little faster inside my veins.

He was going to come that night.

I knew it.

My certainty wasn't any less for the fact that I'd been telling myself the same thing every evening for the prior three days.

After Mulder called me, unable to hide the satisfaction from his voice over his petty act of spite, I began preparing.

Oh, who am I kidding?

I started getting ready the moment I rang Mulder and suggested how he could get Alex fired.

It offended me.

The idea of *my* Alex being a salesman, I mean. It's not that there is anything wrong with *any* honest labor, but Alex working in such a menial job is like using a thoroughbred to pull a plough. On the other hand, if he *hadn't* at least made the effort to get and keep the job, I wouldn't have interfered.

I had to *know* that he meant to keep his promise.

He *had* to at least try and fit into a normal world. It was one of the promises I made myself when I finally faced up to the fact that I still loved him. He had to take that first step.

I'd intended to give him six months. Time enough for me to settle into the new house and see whether I could live without him in my life, but it only took me five days to realize that six months might be enough for him to believe he could live without *me*.

Not acceptable.

So I planned my campaign.

I learnt a lot as a marine. The successful storming of any stronghold depends upon the effective destruction of its defenses. The collapse of the Consortium had removed Alex's foundations, he was swaying in the breeze, ripe for acquisition. The only question was which way he fell; back into crime or back into my arms. His job was a floundering attempt to clutch at a safety rope that suspended him safely between both.

So I cut the rope.

Sink or swim, Alex. It was his choice.

The problem with gardens is that, unless you're an expert, it's difficult sometimes to tell the difference between plants and weeds. So you get yourself a book that helps you identify the difference and you rip the hell out of the flower beds until nothing is left but rows of uniform, obedient plants.

You sit back, with a sigh of satisfaction, certain that your garden embodies the set ideal of perfection. And then you wonder why the hell your garden is just as mindlessly boring as every other perfect little Stepford garden on your street.

You start to lose interest.  The garden becomes little more than a chore, a hated duty, a responsibility that you wish you'd never taken on.

And maybe, because you aren't really paying attention, you let a persistent weed take root unnoticed in the midst of all the perfect flowers. It quietly flourishes and grows, while you aren't watching, and one day you wander down that part of your garden and see that there's a beautiful plant you haven't noticed before.

At first, you're a little bewildered, perhaps a little annoyed that your carefully cultivated flowerbed is suddenly sprawling with new growth. Yet, the new plant is strangely attractive, exotic, brightly hued, sturdy and strong, a little different, a little exciting.

Suddenly it's not a Stepford garden anymore.

So you water the new plant, delight in each new flower, smile at each spurt of growth, even begin to rearrange the neighboring plants so that it can flourish unimpeded.

And then, one day, an expert comes along, takes one look at your pride and joy and announces "That's not a flower, it's a weed."

You're so shocked, so embarrassed at your ignorant foolishness, that you *hate* the plant that has fooled you with its bright beautiful foliage. You rip it out of the flowerbed and throw it aside as garbage.

Order is restored. Perfection is re-attained.

And then you wonder why the joy has gone out of your garden.

~#~#~#~

The advantage of this town, let's call it Stepford simply because the very reasons I chose to live in it would be negated immediately if I admitted its true name, is that it has such a simple, uniform layout that there is absolutely no way for a stranger to arrive secretly.

Picture one main street, lined either side with rows of small shops, a motel, a single bar. Anyone turning off the main road and into 'Stepford' drives straight through the middle of town, perhaps stops at one or two of the stores and then drives on to the next one-horse town. Perhaps a salesman or two pauses overnight at the motel, the odd lost tourist stays overnight to regain their bearings before returning to 'civilization'. On a Friday night the workers from the surrounding ranches hit the town for a night of quiet debauchery but they are long gone by the time the residents rise from their beds on Saturday morning.

Saturday through Thursday the bar pretends to be a coffee house. Its survival depends upon the revenue of the local townsfolk and since the average age in this town is fifty-plus, there's more call for coffee and cake than beer.

There aren't any families in Stepford. No children at all unless you count the grandchildren who come and stay during the summer holidays. There's no actual town ordinance that forbids the sale of houses to people under retirement age but the fact that it's a three hour drive to the nearest city means that unless you can work from home, you need a substantial bank account to afford to live here. Besides, the school house closed at the same time as the Parkville Medical Facility went out of business.

Stepford is a manufactured town. It sprang up in the middle of nowhere in less than six months. These neat rows of sumptuous, family-sized houses, that radiate at right angles from the main street, were built for the doctors who worked at the clinic. Its isolation from the rest of the world was deliberate, given the nature of the highly infectious diseases that were treated at Parkville. Or, if the rumors are true, the highly infectious diseases that were *manufactured* at Parkville.

A few years after the clinic's unfortunate demise I visited Stepford with a junior agent named Alex Krycek.  Scully was still missing at that point and Mulder had disappeared into the wilds of Arizona on the trail of what he believed was a government cover-up. Parkville was one of the facilities that had been mentioned in his case file, so I came here in the hope of finding my errant Agent.

I expected to find a ghost town. Instead, I found a thriving community of retirees. Some enterprising soul had bought the entire town for a pittance, had bulldozed Parkville out of existence and had sold Stepford as a retirement dream, an isolated peaceful community where people didn't even have to lock their doors at night.

The other thing I found in Stepford was the first and only true love of my whole life.

Learning that Mulder *had* indeed visited the town several days earlier,  we were just about to hare out of town on his trail when I paused to phone in to the bureau and discovered that the little bastard had already flown back to DC and was sitting at his desk.  I wanted to kick his ass so badly that I was all for driving straight for the airport.

Alex managed to persuade me that it made more sense to get a motel room for the night and head home the next morning. So I spent the evening working on reports in my motel room.  I have no idea what Alex did that night, but knowing him now for what he is, I don't believe it was co-incidence that our hire car refused to start the next morning.

We were trapped in Stepford for three days. It only took 24 hours to get the new starter motor via UPS but Alex pretended he knew nothing about mechanics and the only person in town who *did* know how to mend the car was seventy-six and chronically arthritic. It took him an entire day to take out the old motor and another day to replace it with the new one.

In the meantime, well, there wasn't *that* much to do in a place with no movie theatre and a bar that only served alcohol on a Friday night.

So, perhaps just out of boredom, I decided to take the opportunity to get to know my Agent a little better. As later events proved, I didn't get to *know* him at all. 

All I did was fall in love with him.

~#~#~#~

The disadvantage of Stepford's layout is that just as its impossible for a stranger to approach any of the houses secretly, so it is virtually impossible to find a suitable hiding place to lay in wait for that said stranger.

All of the houses are bordered by plain picket fences, the house deeds forbid the planting of hedges or trees that would disrupt the plain perfection with any individuality.  Other than lying prone in the narrow drainage ditch that runs the length of each street, there was nowhere I could wait unobserved for my visitor to arrive.

Except in a different house.

It was surprisingly easy to arrange.  Anna Coren, the only neighbor who hadn't attempted to woo me yet - simply because she couldn't move her zimmer-frame fast enough to catch me - had been waiting several months for a hip-replacement operation. A couple of phone calls, a small bribe, a few favors called in, and Anna moved miraculously to the top of the waiting list and was whisked off to hospital. Naturally, being a good neighbor, I offered to look after her house while she was gone.

~#~#~#~

The thing about weeds is that they are almost impossible to destroy. You rip them out by the roots until there isn't even the barest trace that they ever existed. You bid good riddance to bad rubbish and relax in the certainty that they are dead, dead, dead. You relax and almost forget that they ever existed.

And then they come back.

Again, and again and again.

So, somewhere along the way, your anger begins to transform into a reluctant admiration for their persistence. As much as you hate their presence, you can't help feeling impressed at their determination to survive. Yet, as they attempt to take root in soil that is becoming progressively stonier, it is easier each time to rip away their shallow precarious foothold.

Until, one day, you destroy them so utterly that it takes months for them to even dare to encroach upon you again, and this time they are so fragile, so wounded, that a strong wind could simply blow them away.

And it's only then, when victory is finally in your sight, when one last violent act will eradicate them forever, that you realize you would miss them if they were gone.

~#~#~#~

I was almost asleep, dozing quietly in the shadows of Anna's porch. when the car finally arrived.

My first thought was that it was a false alarm because instead of cutting his engine and lights as he approached, the occupant simply drove at full speed right up to the end of my drive. He didn't slam on the brakes until the last possible minute, as though he was still uncertain whether to stop or just keep on driving.

For several minutes he let the engine idle, still presumably struggling between staying or fleeing.

I don't think I breathed at all until he finally cut the engine.

Then I unwrapped the bundle on my lap and crept stealthily across Anna's lawn, praying desperately that no one would wake up and look out of their window to see me approach the car, shotgun in hand. 

It was a clear moonlit night. There wasn't a single shadow of cover to conceal me as I crossed the lawn. Yet he didn't even notice me until I arrived in front of the car. That, more than anything, confirmed what I'd long suspected about Alex.

He was so tired of the game he no longer even cared whether he lived or died.

That's why I hit him.

It wasn't really the performance he made of stripping his weapons. I would have been disappointed in him if he *hadn't* at least tried to keep one gun or knife on his person before climbing out of the car. It proved, at least, that *some* of his old survival instincts were intact.

Only, to be honest, the whole process smacked a little too much of a rote performance played for my benefit.  One-armed or not, he could have dropped under the dash, rolled and come up firing before I released the safety on the shotgun. He must have known I'd think twice before discharging my weapon in such a public place.

Besides, if I still wanted him dead, I'd have taken the opportunity he'd offered me with our earlier charade.

So when he climbed out of the car and looked at me with those damned tragic eyes, I gut-punched him so hard that his knees hit the floor. It felt good, my fist driving the air out of his lungs and forcing a grunt of pain from his throat.

But not as good as I'd expected.

He was thinner than I remembered him. Less solid, less real, less resilient perhaps.

And I was so angry.

At him.

At myself.

At the whole damned world for the judgments we make that say black is black and white is white and there's no room for people who are different.

I'd already lost my illusions about Alex long before that night.

Once I'd believed him to be no more than a green, fresh-faced innocent with a sinfully seductive body. Then, when he betrayed us, I hated him for daring to be less than the perfection I'd imagined him to be. As time moved on, I vacillated between the belief that he was just plain evil and the decision that he had simply fallen stupidly into a trap that ensnared him too tightly for him to ever break free.

I spent years hating Alex. I spent those same years desperately trying to find justifications for his actions. Even when he killed me, my heart looked for ways to forgive him. The truth, I think, is that I just needed to find an excuse for the fact that I loved him. If I could just find *reasonable* justifications for the choices he had made then I'd no longer feel such a fool for the fact that he'd stolen my heart and then trashed it.

It was only when he offered me the deal, when he gave me the opportunity to end our bitter dance for good, that I finally understood.

Alex was a weed.

It wasn't his fault. It was just the way he was born. He was pretty enough to imitate a flower for a time, but he didn't fit in. He didn't belong. He didn't have the moral strength to be a good man. He didn't have the ruthless ambition to become a bad man.

All he ever was was a survivor.

Every action he took, every decision he made, was always aimed at his own self-protection, regardless of who else got hurt along the way. The psychiatric term, I believe, is a sociopath.  A person who is completely unable or unwilling to behave in a way that is acceptable to society. A person whose own sense of self-preservation overrides all other considerations. The sad thing is that the only person Alex ever really hurt with his selfish desire for personal happiness was himself.

It was Mulder who told me that Alex was psychologically incapable of ever becoming a 'decent' citizen. He pointed out that even when Alex had decided to side with the 'good guys' at the end, it was merely another example of Alex choosing the team that had the best odds of winning.

He was probably right.

If the Consortium had survived, if we had lost, then possibly Alex would have somehow turned things around so he would have ended up working on their side once more. Except there's only so many times you can change sides before you run out of viable excuses. You run out of places to hide. You get to the point where you don't even believe your lies yourself.

And the question becomes this: if you *didn't* have to lie, if you didn't have to pretend to be something you weren't, if someone simply accepted that you were flawed and would never be able to fit within the normal framework of society, if instead of casting you away as garbage someone gave you a place of safety and nurtured you, if someone decided to love you for your difference rather than despite of it, what would you become?

You see, there was no place for an Alex in a Stepford Garden but it seemed that there *was* room for an Alex in mine.

~#~#~#~

"Okay. You want to chain me on the porch? Seeing as you don't have a balcony to freeze my balls off anymore?" he spat, his cat-eyes blazing with a defiant cockiness that was at total odds with his self-acknowledged desire that I should put a bullet through his brain.

Oddly enough, it was that pale spark of enduring sarcastic wit that solidified the decision I had already made. Alex was beaten but not bowed. Ready to face death but still unwilling to relinquish the last shreds of his tattered pride.

He was magnificent.

I don't expect you to understand the way I feel about him. Sometimes I don't fully understand it myself. I suppose to an extent it's his beauty that allows me to overlook certain less attractive aspects of his personality. That's just human nature. Beauty is sufficient reason in itself to allow someone to exist.

Yet that's not why I love him.

I love him because he's a low-down nasty little scrapper who valiantly picked himself up every time he got kicked down into the dirt. He wiped himself off, pulled himself together and waded back into the fight, only to get knocked down again. And even when he reached the end of his rope, when he finally was too damned battered to re-enter the fight, he still decided to go down with sarcasm rather than a whimper.

So what if he'd brought it all down on his own head? Alex had no-one to blame but himself.  He deserved everything that had ever happened to him. I didn't feel sorry for him. I didn't forgive him. Yet I sure as hell admired the fact that he never once tried to justify himself to me.

I asked him what he wanted and he admitted that he wished he could turn back the clock and undo what he'd done. But he never once denied his responsibility for his actions. He didn't hide behind lies. He didn't try and blame his decisions on external pressure. He completely and freely admitted his guilt, just as he'd fully co-operated with the hearings, and while I had put down the latter as nothing more than a game to ensure his immunity from prosecution, in my kitchen there was no hope in him that he would be reprieved. He sat there and gave his apology with no expectation of anything more than a sentence of execution. He made no attempt to placate me.

I admired that.

He was hurting so much that the pain was virtually bleeding out of his pores. Not physical pain but the deep knifing agony of a man who couldn't even look in the mirror anymore without seeing someone he hated. Alex had finally taken a long hard look at himself and he hadn't liked what he found.

I suppose, given our history, it was barely surprising that he sought his death at the hands of a man whose eyes had long reflected the same loathing. Only, deep inside, I think he was also depending on the fact that I still loved him enough to let him die with a little dignity.

He really didn't understand me at all, but that was okay because I finally understood *him*.

He was quite delightfully bewildered when I told him that he would be sleeping inside, particularly when I handcuffed him to my own bed and started to peel off his clothes.

It was only when I lowered my head and caught one of his nipples between my teeth that he gave a yelp of protest.

"Um...Walter," he whispered. "Not that I'm complaining, you understand, but don't you think this is going to make you feel bad when you shoot me tomorrow?"

I stifled my laugh by biting down on the swollen nub of tissue in my mouth and for a few moments he was too busy moaning and writhing beneath me with the sensuousness of a cat to expect a reply.

"It's Sunday tomorrow," I pointed out, then trailed a slow line of wet kisses down the dark arrow of hair that pointed suggestively towards his arousal.

My fingers trembled and caught on the buttons of his jeans. He was so hard for me that the denim was stretched taut and I had to battle to release him.

"Sure I know it's Sunday tomorrow," he gasped. "What the hell's that got to do with anything?"

"I can't kill you on a Sunday, Alex," I told him with a deep sigh, as though he was being obtuse.

"You gone religious on me or something?" he finally managed, before I cut off his further ability to speak by swallowing him whole.

Oh yes, Alex, I decided, as he gave a moan of surprise then began to buck his hips in encouragement.   I've had an epiphany. It involves a one-armed ex-assassin, a lot of lube and time.

Lots and lots of time.

~#~#~#~

"Are you planning to keep me handcuffed to your bed forever?" he asked me sleepily, as I curled around his sated body and rained tiny kisses between his shoulder blades.

"Yes," I promised. "I'm going to keep you forever, Alex, unless you have a problem with that idea."

He started to cry. Slow, silent tears that tracked down his face as the heat of my love began to melt the icy wasteland of his heart.

"No, he finally whispered. "I don't have a problem with that idea, Walter. I don't have a problem at all."

~#~#~#~

I'm no longer considered a potential case for redemption by my neighbors.

It was three weeks before I felt secure enough to let Alex free to wander about the yard unsupervised. His hire car was long gone, it was a hell of a long walk to the next town and, besides, he was walking with a pronounced limp that was directly proportional to the width of the smile on his face. 

Within two days of his release from my bedroom he proved every suspicion I'd ever had that he was an immoral little scumbag.

In less than 48 hours he stole the heart of every damned widow in the street.

The only redeeming feature of his theft was that he was as brutally honest with them as he had been when he came to me and admitted that he'd lost the will to live without me in his life.

He doesn't pretend to be anything now except for Alex.

He spends most Saturdays cruising up and down this formerly quiet street on a Harley Davidson. His James Dean impersonation isn't hampered by his prosthetic. It cost me a small fortune to have the bike adapted for him but it's worth it just to see the grin on his face as he burns rubber up and down the street in his leather jacket and too-tight jeans.

Sure there were a few complaints at first - though not from the good ladies of this sleepy town, I must confess.- particularly when in a particular mood of complete devilry he decided to mow down all the picket fences in our street.

Still, he personally replaced all the damage with various hedges and trees, and he  even built a decidedly decadent gazebo right in the middle of old Al Brontwitz's front yard. 

A hasty town meeting was called. A vote was taken. Possibly because the majority population of Stepford is female, the ordinance that forbade individually styled gardens was overruled.

Alex had won his first battle.

Then he painted Anna Coren's house bright fuchsia pink.

Judging by the smile on her face, she was either happy with the bizarre shade or she was simply color-blind. The local town's meeting that was called in a panic as a result of Alex's endeavors reached the conclusion that there was nothing 'specific' in the deeds that ordained the houses had to be white.

So then he painted Tom Cowling's house crimson.

Talk about painting the town red.

Tom, being 90 if he's a day. is so blind that he just gave Alex a wide toothless grin and thanked him for his efforts. 

Within six months, every house on our street was painted a different color.

Strike two for Alex.

By the end of the first year, the only pound cakes that arrived on our porch had Alex's name on them. 

You know something?

It seems to me that people spend their whole lives searching for perfection. The perfect job, the perfect wife or husband, the perfect kids, the perfect house. Always, incessantly, there is a drive to attain the ideal that is instilled in us since childhood.  All the good people of Stepford, and they *are* good people, came to this town after years of toil and strife. They jealously guarded their nest eggs until they could finally afford to buy their perfect dream homes. They moved in, they luxuriated in the perfection that they had striven so long and so hard to achieve.

Then they realized they hated it.

It took a bad boy moving to town to remind them they were still alive.

Oh, he isn't a kid anymore. His sable hair is flecked with gray, his face is slowly folding into the lines of age, he can't even get it up more than twice a night these days - not that he isn't magnificent still.

But no matter how many years pass, this little town isn't sleepy any more.

The weed has dug his roots in deep and the rest of we pale flowers in this Stepford Garden have learned to grow around him.

At the end of the day, the world is a better place for having an Alex to throw a spoke in the wheel of perfection.

He's original.

He's bad.

But he's mine.

The End