Pansy Cray was wearing a black bra the day Kennedy was shot and that was the first day she noticed the pattern. Whenever she chose to wear her black bra someone - usually someone big and important - was killed somehow. Marilyn Monroe, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, her mailman . she was terrified of the power that the bra held but some force or fascination kept her from throwing it away.

"After all," Pansy noted to the stuffed owl that perched eerily on her mantle. "It might possibly be the end of us all if I discard a cursed brassiere." The owl's claw was half-eaten away and he was missing a significant amount of feathers and an eyeball.

Pansy's late husband Pog had been an avid taxidermist in his younger days; their house had resembled a cross between a zoo and a mortuary for as long as Pansy could remember. Ever since that rainy March afternoon when her husband perished from rabies, Pansy kept the ratty,
stuffed dead animals around to keep her company, and to memorialize her husband.

"That was the first day," she whispered. "The first victim my wicked undergarment claimed. I'll never forget it." Her hand flew to her throat, recollecting the vivid scene of her clasping the black bra that morning before poor Pog passed away, thinking life was a bowl of strawberries.

Her gaze rested on a coiled rattlesnake she called Fang. He looked like someone had broken his body in half and glued it together again. "Fang, today a young singer named John Lennon was shot because I couldn't find my white bra. I know I am going to hell for this. I'm a murderer, a murderer ." She began to cry and grabbed a frozen,
mangled tortoise for comfort. "Or am I God? Am I the all-knowing creator and destroyer?" The tortoise's hind leg cracked due to Pansy's frantic embrace.

She spied the bra, curled so innocently on the floor. It doesn't appear almighty or powerful from there, but that is what it wants you to think, she mused. That thing there is going to be the death of me.

Pansy's life ended that evening as she was trying on the bra in secret. Just one more time, she had told herself as she clasped it and adjusted its thick straps. Then I will get rid of it for good. At that moment, an enormous boar plummeted from its spot on her bookshelf and onto her head. She died smiling at the egret on her night table and hoping to join her darling Pog, the dead celebrities her bra had murdered and the souls of Pog's ratty stuffed animals in
the afterlife. But she didn't.