Fran's First Town Meeting

Oliver sat in the back like he was watching a trainwreck.

Rio Luna's courtroom doubled as the Town Council's meeting place. The five men huddled behind the judge's bench, shoulder to shoulder, squeezing their chairs together to fit behind the large wooden block. The gavel was pushed aside but the message was not lost on Fran.

The Chairman had a shaggy gray moustache, the hairs of which floated when he talked. The other council members nodded up and down along with the Chairman's voice.

The issue was paint. To be specific, paint the Chairman called gaudy and "not at all in the spirit of the Rio Luna town philosophy of conduct." The person in question was young, and female, and new. Not really new, because she was born in Rio Luna, but new because she decided to paint the bar a different color after she inherited the business from her deceased father. New because she had just added a small renovation to her bar and was serving coffee in the morning.

The paint was neon and the style was semi-Victorian, and the few tourists that flew through Rio Luna on their way to Vegas preferred it, rather than the old cafe with vinyl seats.

And the old cafe was owned by the Chairman's brother. Fran took her coffee at the bar.

The young bar owner, in her twenties, poor thing, was rubbing her thumbnail with her index finger, over and over again, and was looking sideways at the council, making eye contact, but keeping her head averted all the same. Her testimony was fractured and nervous, and no one in the meeting remembered what she said.

Fran sat at the folding table behind the podium, put together in her button-up dress. To her amazement, the only emotion she could muster was amusement.

The Chairman finished speaking, and said, "Well, Fran, unless you have a response to that, I will call a vote to close the bar. I think we've all decided."

Fran said, "Two words come to mind." She pointed at the Chairman. "Pontificator." She pointed to the other four men behind the judge's bench. "Sycophants."

The court room was silent. Fran wasn't sure if they were stunned or if they needed a dictionary.