"For mercy sakes, Mercy Slakes!" cried her mother, Marcy, for the fifteen-billionth time but the sound of it didn't trouble Mercy at all for it hadn't reached Götterdämmerung-level, yet. Until then her mother wasn't serious, so Mercy continued on her merry way.

She didn't think of herself as a mean little girl but everybody else did. There wasn't a cat in the neighborhood that would let her anywhere near them except for the Nasty cat and even Mercy avoided the Nasty cat.

She did have one friend. Woofer was old and creaky at times but still game. Woofer was her Dad's dog from his college days, way back in the late '80s. The Stone Age! Woofer enjoyed accompanying his little master on her adventures through the back yards and alleys of their neighborhood. They searched unlocked cars for coins, unfolded newspapers on porches, left voodoo dolls for Chuckie Hornett to find. They tried every garage door each morning and raided vegetable gardens for big, overripe, bug infested tomatoes she could fling at Billy Parsons and his stupid friends.

From their secret spot under the bushes by the big oak tree she and Woofer watched Mr. Carbuncle mow his lawn. He never did it right. He always waited until it was too long or mowed when it was wet, leaving the ugly clumps scattered over his yard without the least understanding of what maintaining a yard was all about or the things it revealed about his character. Other lawns in the neighborhood were as smooth as a Marine recruit's head while Carbuncle's looked like the head of an '80s avant garde poetess. Not that Mercy would have known that, of course. She just knew that Carbuncle was doing it wrong and that he left big hunks of congealed wet green stuff behind that she could use for her business.

And her business was making trouble.
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m
— Ipso
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Like the time she and Woofer were caught inside Mel Banque's garage. She said that she'd just wanted to borrow Banque's tire chains for a little while. For what reason she never said. Upon closer inspection it was discovered that she'd also opened up several boxes Banque never wanted opened by anyone, ever, much less by a mischievous little girl. She made 20 bucks out of that adventure and got to keep the chains, which she hid in one of the secret places only she and Woofer knew about.

One day while rooting around in old man Johnson's basement (it had a door to the outside and Johnson was out of town visiting friends) Mercy discovered the desiccated body of a young boy. His tongue lolled out dryly and his eyed bugged in a most peculiarly goofy manner.

"Cool!" she laughed out loud.

Within a short while she had found over a dozen of the curious dried out and most satisfyingly gruesome corpses, not to mention numerous body parts, heads in jars, etcetera. That night she brought back several kids, charging them each 50 cents to view the awful spectacle. Each night after that the crowd grew bigger and bigger. She was making money faster than she could spend it. Her little tummy was stretched fat and round with all the goodies she'd eaten and there was an unhealthy greenish tint to her complexion.

That night a car stopped in the driveway and Mr. Johnson got out carrying his suitcase. He noticed the door to his basement ajar. Hesitantly walking inside he fumbled for the light switch while the children huddled trembling inside.

"Alwoo!" they cried when the light came on, a dozen terrified kids and one dog, charging past him for the door, nearly stopping poor Mr. Johnson's heart. Johnson, it turned out, had recently retired from the movie industry where he made gruesome masks, dolls, and dummies for the horror films. He'd kept his original models stored in his basement and occasionally sold a "piece" to a collector.

Reflecting upon it later in her room with Woofer, grounded until sometime after her 47th birthday, Mercy told him, "You just never know what you'll find until you look." She then said her prayers and went to sleep, smiling as she dreamt about tire chains and daffodils.