Pippi Longstocking visited my office today. She has abandoned her signature pigtails for a long, dirty-blond bob and borrowed Dakota Fanning’s face and today she came with her aunt to my office. She was wearing knee high, red and white striped socks and white tennis shoes, two sizes too large, with hot pink laces dragging the floor. She started off her aunt’s visit by asking me for a band-aid. No, not that little one, because she needed had a big scratch. See? She pulled up the leg of her baggy black shorts and showed me a large scratch on her leg, definitely requiring a large band-aid, which I provided. She giggled about the fact that her Powerade and Starbursts were in the bag with her aunt’s medication, since they aren’t medicine at all and asked me why her jaw hurt sometimes when she chewed things. When I pulled out the Neurontin bottle and asked if they were being taken three times a day as instructed, she told me her aunt was only taking them twice a day now because it was only the second week and she was on a tapered dose.

She lived with her aunt. The aunt gave me this information. “She’s lived with me since her dad died, three years ago, that was my brother, her dad was my husband, yeah, brother. My brother died one year and my husband died the next year, and the next year I got put in jail.” She interrupted herself with an odd giggle and went on, “I got put in jail because I killed my sister, at least that’s what she said. They said I stabbed her right in her chest!” She stopped and showed me the general area where the knife went in. “If it had been two inches over I would have hit her heart and killed her. But I was blacked out. Because I have blackout spells and I can’t remember anything that happens.” She stared at me, wide-eyed and honest. “Not a thing.”

I let the imp watch me give her aunt a shot, because “shots are so awesome!” and told her she needed to come back and see me sometime. What I really wanted to say, though, was “Hey, why don’t you come live with me? I have a spare bedroom and lots of extra imagination, and I never black out and accidentally kill people. Ever. And I have lots of band-aids.”

She said she’ll come see me sometime.