Kashmir was dead to begin with.

There is no doubt whatsoever about that.

The register of her burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the ducks, Casey

Tony, former governor of Massachusetts Mike Tukakis, and won J.P. Rittles.

While he signed it, J.P. Rittles croaked,

go, go, Kashmir is as dead as a door nail. In dead she was, this must be understood, or

nothing wonderful can come from this story that I'm going to relate.

It is a bleak, freezing Christmas Eve. We see the tops of buildings capped in ice and

with smoke coming from their chimneys. The church bells bring no warmth to the cobblestone

streets covered in grey snow. Poor children hold their pet rats with one hand and run alongside

a hoop pushing it every so often with a stick. Even poor children look on and hope that

St. Nicholas will bring them a rat in a hoop of their very own this evening.

Bake off.

Resume in on a particular dead end street. The snow flurry's whooshing past us. At the

end of the street we see a building. With a plaque that reads, J.P. Rittles and Coco

Kashmir's rental property business. The second name had been scratched out. It had

been scratched out years ago. This building was a real hole in the ground. It was somehow

colder inside than it was outside. The candles that lit the business smelled like rotten

garbage and created a sickly beige glow across the room filled with quills, bookkeeping,

acorns, blood packets for pranks, backup blood, horse blood, coal, urine puddles and piles

of money that the men who worked there had collected from the helpless tenants across the city.

At his desk scribbling away was the man whom this cautionary tale is about. J.P. Rittles

...