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A sudden whim found him crossing to the ottoman, picking up the crouton and crushing it in his hand. He let the crumbs fall onto the dark spot on the carpet where he'd pissed himself, and he laughed another fake laugh, a mad scientist's giggle that pleased him immensely. He strode out the door feeling the situation was well in hand.

He'd deal with the carpet later.

"What do you mean, a crouton?"

"I mean a crouton, mom, a little piece of dried bread you put on a salad."

There was a pause on the line as his mother digested this information. Ted was back in his apartment, sporting a row of six stitches in the back of his head and an ice pack on his upper chest where he'd taken the brunt of the hot water. The doctor told him his burns were relatively minor, but that he'd probably look and feel like someone with a bad sunburn for a couple of days.

As for the skiers in the clinic, they'd barely noticed him, involved as they were in their own pain, their own forms to fill out and the unpleasant fact that their expensive ski vacation had been cut short by injury. By the time Ted got out of there, it was after 8 o'clock, so he grabbed some dinner at the soup place and was eating it on the couch while talking to his mother.

The Crouton Incident, as he was calling it now in his mind, had grown too big to keep to himself. The pain-killers the doctor had given him had deadened his senses enough that he thought he could handle his mother's 20 questions. Spooning cream of asparagus soup into his mouth, he countered her interrogation with what seemed to him Job-like patience.

"Why?"

"Why what, mom?"

"Why did you put a crouton on your ottoman?"

"I didn't put it there, mom. I told you, it just appeared. Twice. I don't know who put it there. It could have been evil snowboarders, the mob, aliens, an intelligent gas from Pluto. I don't know."

"A what?! Gas, your gas is leaking? Get out of there NOW, Ted. I mean it! Call 911!"

So much for trying a Vonnegut allusion with his mother. After reassuring her his apartment was not going to erupt in a natural-gas explosion, he asked her to hold her questions until he'd recounted the entire series of events.

There was another pause, longer this time — very unusual for his mother, who was seldom at a loss for words. Finally, she spoke in a low, conspiratorial tone:

"You have to get out of there, Ted. That's it, that's all there is to it. Come down to Denver and move in with me. We'll find you a place, another job. There's lots of girls down here, Ted, all hungry for a nice young man like you and..."

"Mom," he said, "I'm OK here, really. It's just a friggin' crouton, for god's sakes. And besides, I think I may have found somebody."

Ted was exaggerating, but there was a "somebody" of sorts. Her name was Elizaveta, and she was from Kazakhstan. In addition to the area's sizable Hispanic population, Breckenridge also had a lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe. It wasn't unusual to find someone from Georgia behind the deli counter at the grocery store, or Polish guys doing roofing or just-off-the-boat Russians or Czechs cleaning condos. One of Ted's clients had a company that brought them over and found them service-industry jobs. It was Bricklin who'd suggested a maid after Ted mentioned he was spending his Saturday morning cleaning his condo.

"You're doing what? You're cleaning? Why?"

It was what Ted always did on Saturday in his ongoing quest to achieve spotlessness. It wasn't like he loved the process of cleaning so much, but he did like the feeling of being around clean. He didn't have that much else to do, anyway. Unlike 99 percent of the town's population, Ted did not ski or snowboard. He was drawn to the winter landscape of Summit County simply because it was so very clean. Nearly devoid of insects, covered in snow half the year or more and with crisp, high-altitude air, it was almost perfect but for May's mud season and the diesel pickups many locals seemed to favor.

"Ted, you are _not_ cleaning your own place," Bricklin said. "That's ridiculous. I'll send someone over, cost you 50 bucks a week, that's all."

He hung up before Ted could protest. But having someone come into his place and make it perfectly clean once a week? How bad could that be?

Elizaveta rang his doorbell on the very first day of September. She had a plastic carrier of cleaning supplies, and she wore faded jeans of some unknown European brand along with a stained jersey T-shirt and worn canvas shoes. She just smiled at him, and Ted felt himself literally go weak in the knees — something he'd never experienced before, so far as he could remember. She was, quite simply, the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on. Her hair was raven black and tied up in a pony tail. She had deep brown eyes and the high cheekbones and pert nose he was used to seeing in Vanity Fair advertisements. She had a lovely mouth with thick lips and slightly crooked, white teeth, which she deployed in a smile that seemed to radiate a form of energy heretofore unknown to man.

In fact, Ted found he couldn't bear to look Elizaveta directly in the face after their first meeting. Despite the fact she was there to scrub his toilet and sink and vacuum his carpet, she was more goddess descending from Olympus to Ted. As a mere mortal, there was nothing he could offer her, nothing he could say, no level ground from which to approach her. She may as well have been one of the women in those magazine ads; the closest he could get to her was to sniff the page.

On that first day, he mumbled something about errands and left, returning hours later when Elizaveta was gone, leaving only cleanliness and fresh smells in her wake.

So it was just as well that he rarely saw her. She cleaned on Thursdays while he was at work. He knew it was still her cleaning the place, though, because she would occasionally leave him terse notes in her scrawling, exotic hand:

Ted, need flour. -E

That was one of her early notes, and it was set atop a fresh-baked banana bread. From the start, Elizaveta was more than your average cleaning woman. She did things like clean the silverware separator and dust the top of the refrigerator (both things Ted did, for sure, but he was under the impression he was largely alone in such endeavors). She even folded the end of the toilet paper roll in a neat triangle, a source of mild embarrassment to Ted, who was generally loathe to acknowledge the need for such.

For his part, Ted would write notes to Elizaveta before he left on Thursday mornings. At first he would ask for little things like "Please straighten up the pots & pans cabinet" or "baseboards could use a wipe." But later he went for short and cute: "Hi E! Thanks again for doing the things you do! You da bomb! —T"

He would imagine her puzzling over his Americanisms, bringing his notes to her friends to help decipher. In his imagination, she would giggle, smile and clutch the note to her breast.

On occasion, Ted would contrive to appear while Elizaveta was still in his apartment, just to catch a glimpse of her unearthly beauty. He tried to time it to when he figured she'd just be leaving (he certainly didn't want to catch her on her hands and knees in the bathroom). These meetings were brief and awkward, but Ted was convinced that, after a few years of such encounters, something might come of it.

It was Thursday now, two days after the second crouton encounter. No crouton had appeared on Wednesday — a fact that had worked to make Ted even more apprehensive had one actually appeared. Whoever it was, there was some twisted psychology involved. They were messing with him, big time.

Logically, Ted told himself, there was no reason to doubt that the crouton placer was Elizaveta. She was the only other person apart from the property manager guy who had access to his apartment. At the same time, it made absolutely no sense for someone charged with making the place spotless (which she did, with flying colors) to leave such an item on his pristine white ottoman. But what if it was some kind of Kazakhstani ritual or tradition?

It still didn't fit. Elizaveta was a perfectionist, a clean freak like him, and she knew how Ted liked things. The crouton, unlike, say, an apple or a wrapped granola bar, was a messy comestible. It shed crumbs readily, left a visible (if slight) slick of oil behind it, and was unwrapped and porous — a natural collector of microbes, dust, pollen, filth.

It had taken Ted several days to arrive at the Elizaveta theory for, although it was screechingly obvious, the pairing of The Crouton Incident and the Goddess was difficult for him to parse. After all, Elizaveta was the embodiment of something wonderful that Ted desired greatly, whereas the crouton, well, it was an unwelcome guest, a condiment non-grata, a flaking, oily intruder that had pierced his domestic tranquility with all the subtly of a Tomahawk missile. Already his mind had conjured what escalations might be forthcoming. Would he come home to find a half-eaten Pop Tart on the ottoman? A hunk of bloody whale blubber or a calf's liver? In his more elaborate flights of fancy, Ted had poked around wikipedia to identify even more objectionable foodstuffs and their ingredients or properties, just to be prepared if the worst came to pass:

> Haggis: the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep mixed with onions, spices, oatmeal and suet and boiled in the animal's stomach.

> Borewors: sheep, pig and/or cattle intestines stuffed with meat and offcuts, then barbecued.

"Offcuts," Ted said aloud to himself.

> Swedish blood dumplings: reindeer blood mixed with flour and served with bacon.

> Seal flipper pie from Newfoundland.

"Stop it Ted," he finally said, closing his laptop. "Just wait for Thursday and ask Elizaveta if she knows anything about the crouton."

And so he did.

Ted knew from past experience that Elizaveta finished his apartment sometime between 3:30 and 4 in the afternoon. Leaving work early, he found himself creeping down the hallway to his door with the air of a man intent on surprising a burglar. For a moment, he stood outside his door, listening for activity within. It was silent for a moment, and then he heard the toilet flush.

Good. That meant she was done with the bathroom, probably. He waited another minute, then made a great show of jangling keys and stomping feet as he entered. Elizaveta was bending over the couch straightening pillows, her perfect rear marred only slightly by the odd-fitting exchange-student jeans she wore.

He flashed back to a time a few months previous when he'd found her in a similar position. Her shirt had ridden up her back, exposing the top of her plain, white panties and a few inches of skin. He was certain it was the exact moment he'd fallen in love with her, because he couldn't help but notice two things in that flash of time before she stood up:

1. The panties were dingy and ripped, the elastic band separated from the fabric. Yet she looked 10 times sexier in them than the most incendiary lingerie model, and Ted felt a twinge of something like guilt: the most beautiful woman in the world was forced to wear shabby panties.

2. She had a tiny tattoo that appeared in the space between the elastic and the rest of her panties: Two little bumblebees – nothing more.

Ted had actually worked himself up to ask about them, aware that doing so would tip his slightly voyeuristic hand. She paused a moment at the question, considering him and his query. Then she smiled, patting her chest.

"Me," she said. "Busy bee, right? Always working." She laughed a wonderful laugh. "Yes, busy bee, but never the money to go with."

Today, though, her shirt was tucked in, and Ted had to mentally paint the bees in their proper place.

She stood up when he entered but did not turn around.

"Hi Elizaveta!" Ted said, in a stupid-sounding, faux-surprised voice that reverberated around the tiny condo as if it had been issued through a bullhorn. His eyes fell to the kitchen table where his note from that morning lay, crumpled in a ball.

He felt a sickening stab in his stomach as he recalled what he'd written.

E, had an accident in here the other night. Cleaned as best I could but ran out of time. Spot on carpet and (sorry!) blood in bathroom. Damn crouton, believe it or not! —T

He'd guessed she wouldn't even know what a crouton was – at least not in English. And when he'd written it, the suspicion that she was the bearer of the crouton was only a latent presence in his mind. He'd half-hoped the crouton mention in the note would lead to a longer note from her requesting an explanation, and maybe even expressing concern or regret for his accident.

"Elizaveta?"

She was still facing away from him, her hands at her sides. Slowly, she turned around to reveal her angelic face streaming with tears. She held her hands out to Ted, palms up, as if in supplication.

"Oh, Ted! So sorry... you fell?"

He stood frozen for a moment, not knowing whether to maintain some sort of professional distance or to step forward and embrace her, comfort her. That, of course, would entail putting his arms and hands around the most beautiful woman in the world. He settled for taking two steps toward her and extending his own palms outward.

"It's, it's OK Elizaveta. I'm OK. Just a, a bump on the head is all."

She took a step toward him, her hands now together, nervously moving against themselves as if she were applying lotion. She gave him what he interpreted as an imploring look, then cocked her head to the left and down. Her voice dropped to where he could barely hear the next thing she said.

"And... Ted?"

"Yes, Elizaveta?"

The hands moved against each other some more.

"You pee... yourself?"

He took a step back, then another as her eyes slowly came up to meet his. Part of his brain insisted he keep going until he reached the door. He still had his coat on; he could go down to Clint's for a coffee and wait a few hours to make sure she was gone. Then he'd call Bricklin the next day and tell him he needed a new cleaning woman. Man, even. A guy would be fine.

But he stood his ground, his mind quickly processing the options:

1. Deny it. Offer some story about a friend's dog, a neighbor's cat or some drunk guy who mistook Ted's apartment for his own.

2. Laugh it off. Yep, Elizaveta, that was me: pissed all over my carpet. He could mention some health problem, maybe. But, then, beautiful women didn't want to hear there was anything wrong with a guy's plumbing.

3. Tell the truth, sheepishly.

With Elizaveta's eyes on him, he turned away, his gaze resting on the carpet, the spot in question. It looked damp in a uniform circle shape, which he took to mean Elizaveta had already cleaned it. In fact, he thought he smelled some kind of masking fragrance — like Febreze. As he was settling on No. 3 and deciding how to start, he felt a light hand on his shoulder and Elizaveta's whispered "It is... OK."

Slowly, he turned, his hands finding her waist while her other hand landed softly on his cheek.

"I was scared," said Ted. "I'm all alone here and when the thing showed up the second time, I , I..."

And then her lips were on his and, for the first time since a game of spin-the-bottle 12 years before, Ted kissed a girl. She was, in fact, the only one ever after that, and when their children and grandchildren threw them a 50th anniversary party in 2060, the cake was decorated to look like a giant crouton.

"So it was you?" he asked, as they broke off that first, most extraordinary kiss of all time.

She smiled. She nodded.

"But... why?"

Elizaveta laughed — a tiny, staccato giggle Ted would soon learn to love. "Look at us, Ted. Worked, right? Like charm."

He couldn't deny it. The damn croutons had done what his mother, half a dozen shrinks and a score or two of web-hookup blind dates had failed to do: got him a girl.

Ted smiled a wide smile — so wide, in fact, that muscles in his face unused to such grinning were taxed to their limit.

"But why a crouton, Elizaveta?"

She smiled, tossed her hair a bit and shrugged.

"I poor cleaning woman, Ted. They were on sale. At store."

### About the Author

T. Alex Miller is a graduate of the University of Colorado-Boulder creative writing program. His writing career has been spent mostly in community newspapers, although he also worked for a year in Hollywood (in development at the Sci-Fi Channel) and edited a magazine in Los Angeles (LA Family). He is currently the editor of the Summit Daily News, a newspaper in Frisco, CO.

In addition to his career in journalism, Miller has been active in theatre as an actor, director and playwright. His plays have been produced locally as well as in conjunction with the state theatre festival. They include _5 Gears in Reverse, The Adjudicators, Velociraptors_ and _Outrageous Claims._ His novels, _Ohiowa_ and _Zombie Road Trip are_ also available as ebooks.

Miller lives in Frisco, Colorado with his wife, Jen, and their children. Contact him at talex10@gmail.com.