"She divorced her symphony-phony. Maybe she's looking for a more earthy type man. Somebody less ethereal." Ethereal!" Susan said, feigning outright aw.... "Listen to Dan, here, tossing around his fifty-dollar words!" We didn't talk about our exes that much," Arlie said. "Even I am aware that that's a no-no on a date, talking about your dear departed wife, or your ex-husband." It's okay, as long as you can say something bad, " Dan said. "You wouldn't have minded, would you, Arlie, if she'd told. In a way, she felt very lucky that the guards placed her between two of those poles. At least this way, she would be standing upright and not bent over at the waist for the whole time.She was again standing in a spread eagle position. However, her arms weren't stretched out this time. They were just hanging down in the restraints and her hands were at the same height as her head. Not that this gave her some freedom to move, because the ropes between her wrists and the poles were very short.. It wasn’t anything evil, or even bad, in fact, it seemed like a good thing at the time. My family simply moved to a better house. I was no longer his neighbor and constant companion, and we just sort of… fell apart. We talked over the phone once in a while, but I noticed that he never called me. I tested this theory by waiting longer and longer before calling him, until one day, I realized that years had passed. Why did he never call me? That question still eats at me to this very day. We still. And that, I had to admit, was something that I needed very badly.There was an air lock between the barnyard and the residential section of Heinlein Station for the simple reason that no one would have been very happy to have to live in a barn with the animals. The odors they created were obnoxious at best. As I stepped out of the door of our house that only remotely resembled a shipping container I noticed that the area had begun to green up a bit where there wasn't water. We had brought grass.