The Prissy Prim Piano Teacher: The Madwoman of Cliffside

It finally happened. Prissy Prim flipped. Just ask the poor working stiffs who got stranded at 3:00AM the other night at the tacky starter-mansion that's been trying to be her next-door neighbor for the last 2 years. The men knew it the first time they glanced up and saw the bent cardboard tube with mirrors in it extending from the door to her deck. There was a large eye, reflected in that tube. Further scrutiny would have revealed long, straggly, silverish strands of hair catching in the sea breeze, just beyond that door that had slid open so silently.

But Oh! And B

egorrah! Could this be? Could they actually be dismantling the Cliffside Cannibal Cavern? Our dithering damsel continues agitated for as long as the gents keep hauling out armloads of lumber. (It was only carpet, that first night. Mercy! Such hard workers! I hope they're being paid enough!)

Yet alas and alack...it's probably just another illegal remodel causing them to gut the place. Drat it all, if true. The house needs to go, you know. It's needed to ever since Mr. SlickoSleaze the Contractor came in, signed an agreement not to cut into the old-growth cedar covering that lot, then proceeded to clear-cut the works. "Sorry," he oozed, "just couldn't resist that view!" (We don't know how he got around the legalities, but he did.) I'm sure that the additional $5,000 added to the house's price was well worth the many-centuries'-old effort that those cedars had just expended. Ask President Bush. Er...Cheney.

What neither contractor, nor new homeowners with obscenity-shrieking kids and pink plastic FisherPrice yard decor, nor their three neurotic dogs could know (okay, maybe the dogs did), was that the house and lot were now haunted into perpetuity. That's why, within their first year of

residence-in-the-wrong-place, the parents found themselves--oh, surprise!--divorced. The wife and kids were scared poopless of the place. There were really creepy sounds at night, besides. (It's a spotted owl, stupid. You're parked smack in the middle of its shopping cart.) There were creekings, and groanings (those are fir and alder scratching each others' backs; besides, they don't like you). The storms were terrifying--way too much oxygen going on. The impeccably hydroseeded 55-degree embankment was impossible to mow, and was being overrun by bracken and prickly blackberries that hurt the darling bellowing children's tender feet whenever they stepped outside to kill each other. Besides, there were really, REALLY ugly, croaking big herons and things. Yeeeww. Gross. And...um...wasn't the house starting to tip rather precariously?

Hmhh. They all thought that if they moved in and took over Priss's rural bit of heaven, the grumpy, eccentric Old Guard would be properly overwhelmed and leave. I mean, LOOK at that weird old bat, the rundown A-frame not 50 feet from our fine new front door! Probably doesn't