It started out like any typical day in suburbia. Percolators perked, toasters toasted, garage doors opened to disgorge cars heading toward the freeway. Everything was beautifully ordinary until the shadow appeared; it lighted across the rug of Martin's home office, drifted over his desktop and was crushed beneath the weight of the white, short, stubby envelope landing on the blotter.

He looked up to see his wife, Annette, abnormally pale and ghastly, her short blond hair looked frazzled, her eyes shimmied with a caffeine rattle. She knew the reason behind the mail but couldn't control her nervous question: "What is it, Marty?" He looked at the return address, a blue and red logo with a stylized "I", the corporate symbol for the Interline Online Service. "What is it?"

"S'probably nothing, Annie. Confirmation of something or other" he cautiously proposed. "Remember I entered some of those contests with them?"

"You don't win contests, hon... You're not that lucky. It's the bill, isn't it?" He grimaced because, he knew deep down, that was true. Martin Holst never had anything simply come to him. He always had to make his own opportunities, always struggled for every opened door, every turned table... His excuses, something he contrived for her benefit, were already betraying him. Rather than prolong the inevitable, he retrieved the brass letter opener, the one that looked like a saber for G.I. Joe, from the long top drawer. He slipped it between the flap and the compartment of the envelope and slashed the top with a clean stroke. He pulled the slip out and read it silently, his jowls pulled into his lap by an unseen emotional weight. "What's it say?" she asked.

He took a deep breath, a sigh of sorts, and responded, "It's the bill. They're shutting down our connection."

She looked about ready to burst into tears. "But you paid! You pay every month! How could they do that?"

"It's not the same, hon..."

"What's not the same?! Money is money! You paid, so why are they shutting down our service?"

"It's not the..." He couldn't finish his thought. He stood up, slid his redwood chair back underneath the desk and walked to the window. The morning was so perfect, so blatantly ordinary, a utopia of stability and sameness. He watched the children board the school bus and wondered what his kids, their kids, would have been like.

She came up from behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, burying her face into his shoulder and neck. "We can go away. Somewhere where they can't find us. They can't make us pay if they can't find us." It was a childlike wish on her part, and eminently unattainable. They had no place to go where they couldn't be found; the idea was preposterous. He turned around and kissed her, breathing in the life from her, trying to make her very soul a part of his in some deeply spiritual way.

He felt the giant box forming over his head, from nothingness, and it read in boldfaced Times New Roman lettering:

"This connection will be terminated in two minutes".

Beneath the ominous statement were two buttons. One read, "accept" and the other read, "deny". She jumped and swatted at the deny button, shouting furiously at it when it refused to loosen at her fist falls. "You can't do this!" she insisted. "Damn it, you can't do this to me! You can't screw around with our lives like this!"

Already he was breaking up into random specks of letters and numbers, pixels of red, blue and green, snippets of sound bite and white noise.

"What? Marty, what are you saying?"

He repeated the phrase but it was pointless by this time. Audible communication failed them for the final time. His disembodied hand reached out to hers, grabbed it, and held it like the roots dangling from a cliff-face. The body, the genetic matter, was nothing more than the speculative now but the soft wetness of his kiss and his tears were all too real. The world went dark.

Martin woke up in front of his shabby PC. It started out like any typical day in the whole wide world. Percolators failed to start as programmed, toasters burned in the corners of cramped kitchens in efficiency apartments, parking garages all over the city hemorrhaged with the honking of disgruntled drivers. Everything was terribly ordinary and all that remained of his internet connection was a sentence spelled out in twelve-point Times New Roman, a cursor blinking wistfully behind it...

"I love you too."