On The Beach, Continued

When the first season of The New Bewitched was wrapped, Darrin had a few weeks off to think. In his basement, he had sought to create an object of terrible beauty, an object not seen since the first act of the play, The Demiurge. He created to destroy. He became a slave to the wheel until it ground him under, and in a fit of pique, he obliterated it.

"Why?" asked the Woman of the Photographs, when he called her while she was in Missouri.

"I don't know," he said.

"Can't you get Samantha to twinkle her nose and reconstruct it?"

Darrin thought a moment. "Hmmm... maybe so. But I can't tell her what for."

"Lie, you doofus! Ask her to reconstruct the *area* that it was in."

He thought about asking Tabatha to do it... but he knew that she was just tell Samantha, anyway. So, that night, Darrin slid up behind Samantha as she was washing the dishes.

"Loved the meatloaf," he said.

"Oh, Darrin, you *hate* my meatloaf," Samantha sighed. "Whadda want? You want me to pimp your Toyota?"

Darrin explained that there was, uh, a problem with his workbench, and could she progress it back, say, three months?

"Only if you get me that solitaire that I saw at Viandries this weekend."

What's a few grand? Darrin thought. So, Samantha wiped her hands on her apron, twinkled, and went back to her dishes.

Darrin waited a few discrete minutes, then traipsed downstairs to find the object of terrible beauty, magically reconstructed, still sparkling with fairy dust.

He had a year to finish it. A veteran of the insurance business, he worked best when there was a dealine... except that this deadline was literal. The New Bewitched would run only two seasons, and he would be gone.

"You must have found another floozy," the Woman of the Photographs wailed one night, her voice crackling in and out on the cell phone.

Darrin sensed a trap, and said nothing. Implicit in her wail was the assurance that he would always return to her. And his object of terrible beauty would suck the world into itself.