"AAAAGH!" it cries.  "OW!  OW!  OW!  OW!"

    After working it over several minutes, the pile is finally subdued.

    You lower the hoe, exhausted and sweaty.

    Katie is standing nearby looking at you strangely.

    "Hey, Brad, have you seen Milty down here?  Eva's been looking all over for him."

    "No, I haven't seen Milty all da--  Wait a second..." you say.

    You pull apart the gnarly pile of refuse, and there under it all is little Milton Papamagaritus, battered and bleeding, lying motionless.

    "Holy shit, Brad.  You killed Milty," says Katie.

    "But..." you say.  "He... I thought he was a... and he had a hand..."

    "That hand," says Katie pointing to the human hand in Milton's grasp, "was his uncle Christos's severed hand.  Milty's been playing with it all week."

    "Katie," you say.  "You... you gotta help me.  I don't wanna go to jail.  What if they deport me to Greece?!  You won't tell them it was me, will you?"

    "OK, calm down," says Katie.  "We need a plan."

    "What kind of plan?  A getaway plan?"

    "No," says Katie.  "We don't need to run.  That will just make us look guilty.  We need to make it look like a suicide."

    "Like he beat himself to death with Poppy's hoe?"

    "Basically, yeah."

    "What do we do?"

    "OK," says Katie, staying level-headed.  "I'll stay here and wipe your fingerprints off of this hoe.  You go get me a pen and some paper, and a Greek-English dictionary."

    "Right," you say and head upstairs.

    You rush your way through the kitchen and dining room.  In the living room you grab a pad of paper, a pen, one of Poppy's smoking pipes, and an ancient Greek-English dictionary from a bookshelf behind Poppy's armchair.

    Panicked and nervous, you rush back downstairs to the scene of the crime.

    "OK," you say, dumping all the stuff in front of Katie.  "Here's all the stuff."

    "What's that?" asks Katie, pointing at the pipe.

    "Hunh?" you say.  "Didn't you ask for a pipe?"

    "No, but don't worry," says Katie.  "In fact, that's good.  No one would suspect that if someone were trying to make it look like a suicide they would add something as random as a pipe to the crime scene."

    "Now what?" you ask.

    "All right," says Katie.  "Now we need a note.  A suicide note in Greek.  I'll write it in English, then you look up the Greek equivalent."

    "OK, got it," you say.

    It takes the two of you nearly three hours, but finally your note is complete.

    When it gets dark outside, the two of you don worker's gloves and carry Milty's rigormortis body over to the back of the Sharon House of Pizza.

    You place the note and the deadly hoe beside the body, and then quietly sneak back to Poppy's house.

    The note, translated back into English reads roughly like this:

        I am Milton J. Papamagrat Papamagaritus.
        All people think of me as quiet little Greek
        boy, but you are not knowing of my pain.  I
        wish for me to be sex-crazed man, and yet
        no little girls enjoy me in a dirty way.  Today
        I break free of plastic bla sheets that hold me
        down.  With Poppy's hoe I will beat myself into
        manhood forever.  I love you, Eva, Papa.
        Goodbye.
                            -Milton

    That night Katie goes home, and you get little sleep curled up in the basement.

    Visions of police cars surrounding the house play through your mind.

    You figure you might stand a reasonable chance in court with a temporary insanity plea.

    You imagine what prison life would be like.

    Finally you sleep for about an hour and a half.

    You go upstairs in the morning.  Sarah is at the dining room table eating her breakfast before going off to school.

    She looks through the morning's Sharon Advocate newspaper.

    "Holy shit, Milty's dead," she says.

    You gulp.

    "Says here he beat himself to death with a garden hoe.  What a dork."

    "Well, you know, maybe it was an accident," you blurt out before thinking better of it.

    "No," says Sarah.  "He beat himself with a hoe.  On purpose."

    "Oh," you say quietly.

    ...

    You attend Milton's funeral with Merv and Buddy from Christy's.  His family weeps openly and you feel terrible.  A Greek Army band plays some "Yanni at the Acropolis" tunes, and you feel even worse.

    When everyone else has left, you walk up to Milton's grave and lay down his uncle's severed hand by the tombstone.

    On the way home from the funeral, you pass Katie who is out for a run.  You slow down and roll down your window.

    "Hey, Katie..." you say.  "Thanks."

    She nods, and you drive home.

    That day, you vow to clean the basement, and organize every pile of refuse in the whole cellar so that something good will come of Milton's tragic demise.

    But not right now, because Webster's on.